2) Slezkine (1994) - The USSR As A Communal Apartment PDF

The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic
Particularism
Author(s): Yuri Slezkine
Source: Slavic Review , Summer, 1994, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), pp. 414-452
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2501300
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The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or
How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism
Yuri Slezkine
Soviet nationality policy was devised and carried out by nationalists.

Lenin's acceptance of the reality of nations and "national rights" was
one of the most uncompromising positions he ever took, his theory of
good ("oppressed-nation") nationalism formed the conceptual foun-
dation of the Soviet Union and his NEP-time policy of compensatory
"nation-building" (natsional'noe stroitel'stvo) was a spectacularly success-
ful attempt at a state-sponsored conflation of language, "culture," ter-
ritory and quota-fed bureaucracy. The Lenin Guard duly brought up
the rear (with Bukharin having completed his vertiginous leap from
cosmopolitanism to non-Russian nationalism by 1923), but it was Stalin
who became the true "father of nations" (albeit not all nations and
not all the time). The "Great Transformation" of 1928-1932 turned
into the most extravagant celebration of ethnic diversity that any state
had ever financed; the "Great Retreat" of the mid-1930s reduced the
field of "blossoming nationalities" but called for an ever more inten-
sive cultivation of those that bore fruit; and the Great Patriotic War
was followed by an ex cathedra explanation that class was secondary
to ethnicity and that support of nationalism in general (and not just
Russian nationalism or "national liberation" abroad) was a sacred prin-
ciple of marxism-leninism.
If this story sounds strange, it is because most historical accounts
of Soviet nationality policy have been produced by scholars who shared
Lenin's and Stalin's assumptions about ontological nationalities en-
dowed with special rights, praised them for the vigorous promotion of
national cultures and national cadres, chastized them for not living up
to their own (let alone wilsonian) promises of national self-determi-
nation, and presumed that the "bourgeois nationalism" against which
the bolsheviks were inveighing was indeed equal to the belief in lin-
guistic/cultural-therefore-political autonomy that the "bourgeois schol-
ars" themselves understood to be nationalism. Non-Russian national-
ism of all kinds appeared so natural and the Russian version of marxist
universalism appeared so Russian or so universalist that most of these
The first draft of this essay was written for a seminar organized by the Program for
Comparative Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism at the Henry M. Jackson School of
International Studies, University of Washington. I am grateful to the Program's co-
chairs, Charles Hirschman and Charles F. Keyes, for their hospitality and criticism, as
well as for their permission to submit the piece to the Slavic Review. I also thank Peter
Blitstein, Victoria Bonnell, George Breslauer, Daniel Brower, Michael Burawoy, Jane
Burbank, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Bruce Grant, David Hollinger, Terry Martin, Nicholas V.
Riasanovsky, Reggie Zelnik, the Berkeley Colloquium for the Study of Russia and
Eastern Europe and the University of Chicago Russian History Workshop, for stimu-
lating discussions and helpful comments.
Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994)

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The USSR and Ethnic Particularism 415
scholars failed to notice the chronic ethnophilia of the Soviet regime,

took it for granted or explained it as a sign of deviousness, weakness
or negligence. This essay is an attempt to recognize the earnestness of
bolshevik efforts on behalf of ethnic particularism.' Uncompromis-
ingly hostile to individual rights, they eagerly, deliberately and quite
consistently promoted group rights that did not always coincide with
those of the proletariat. "The world's first state of workers and peas-
ants" was the world's first state to institutionalize ethnoterritorial fed-
eralism, classify all citizens according to their biological nationalities
and formally prescribe preferential treatment of certain ethnically de-
fined populations.2 As I. Vareikis wrote in 1924, the USSR was a large
communal apartment in which "national state units, various republics
and autonomous provinces" represented "separate rooms."3 Remark-
ably enough, the communist landlords went on to reinforce many of
the partitions and never stopped celebrating separateness along with
communalism.4
"A nation," wrote Stalin in his very first scholarly effort, "is a his-
torically evolved, stable community based on a common language, ter-
ritory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a com-
1. Not the first such attempt, of course, but sufficiently different from the previous
ones to make it worth the effort, I hope. My greatest debt is to the work of Ronald
Grigor Suny, most recently summarized in his The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism,
Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
On the last three decades, see also Kenneth C. Farmer, Ukrainian Nationalism in the
Post-Stalin Era (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980); Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, "Eth-
nonationalism and Political Stability: The Soviet Case," World Politics 36, no. 4 (July
1984): 355-80; Philip G. Roeder, "Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization," World
Politics 23, no. 2 Uanuary 1991): 196-233; Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, "The Dialectics
of Nationalism in the USSR," Problems of Communism XXIII (May-June 1974),1-22; and
Victor Zaslavsky, "Nationalism and Democratic Transition in Postcommunist Socie-
ties," Daedalus 121, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 97-121. On the promotion of "national lan-
guages" and bilingualism, see the work of Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver,
especially "Equality, Efficiency, and Politics in Soviet Bilingual Education Policy, 1934-
1980," American Political Science Review 78, No. 4 (October 1984): 1019-39; and "Some
Factors in the Linguistic and Ethnic Russification of Soviet Nationalities: Is Everyone
Becoming Russian?" in Lubomyr Hajda and Mark Beissinger, eds., The Nationalities
Factor in Soviet Politics and Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990). For a fascinating
analysis of state-sponsored nationalism in a non-federal communist state, see Kath-
erine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu's
Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
2. For an excellent overview of recent debates on the ethnic boundaries of polit-
ical communities, see David A. Hollinger, "How Wide the Circle of the 'We'? American
Intellectuals and the Problem of Ethnos since World War Two," American Historical
Review 98, no. 2 (April 1993): 317-37.
3. I. Vareikis and I. Zelenskii, NatsionalPno-gosudarstvennoe razmezhevanie Srednei Azii
(Tashkent: Sredne-Aziatskoe gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1924), 59.
4. For a witty elaboration of the reverse metaphor (the communal apartment as
the USSR), see Svetlana Boym, "The Archeology of Banality: The Soviet Home," Public
Culture 6, no. 2 (1994): 263-92.

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416 Slavic Review
munity of culture."5 On the eve of World War I this definition was not
particularly controversial among socialists. There was disagreement
about the origins of nations, the future fate of nationalism, the nature
of pre-nation nationalities, the economic and political usefulness of
nation states and the relative importance of nations' "characteristic
features," but everyone seemed to assume that, for better or worse,
humanity consisted of more or less stable Sprachnationen cemented by
a common past.6 Language and history (or Schicksalgemeinschaftl"com-
munity of fate," both the precondition and consequence of linguistic
unity), were generally taken for granted; but even the more debatable
items on Stalin's list were usually-if not always explicitly-considered
legitimate. Otto Bauer, who attempted to detach nationality from ter-
ritory, clearly assumed that the "community of fate" was ultimately the
fate of a physical community. Rosa Luxemburg, who believed that the
"principle of nationality" contradicted the logic of capitalism, saw
large, "predatory" nation states as tools of economic expansion. And
Lenin, who rejected the concept of "national culture," routinely spoke
of "Georgians," "Ukrainians" and "Great Russians" as having national
traits, interests and responsibilities. Nations might not be helpful and
they might not last, but they were here and they were real.
As far as both Lenin and Stalin were concerned, this meant that
nations had rights: "A nation can organize its life as it sees fit. It has
the right to organize its life on the basis of autonomy. It has the right
to enter into federal relations with other nations. It has the right to
complete secession. Nations are sovereign and all nations are equal." 7
All nations were not equal in size: there were small nations and there
were large (and hence "great-power") nations. All nations were not
equal in their development: there were "backward" nations (an obvious
oxymoron in Stalin's terms) and there were "civilized" nations. All
nations were not equal in their economic (hence class hence moral)
personae: some were "oppressor nations" and some were "op-
pressed." 8 But all nations-indeed all nationalities no matter how
"backward"-were equal because they were equally sovereign, that is,
because they all had the same rights.
5. I. V. Stalin, Marksizm i natsional'nyi vopros (Moscow: Politizdat, 1950), 51.

6. For early marxist debates on nationalism, see Walker Connor, The National
Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984); Helene Carrere d'Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik
State, 1917-1930 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992); Helmut Konrad, "Between
'Little International' and Great Power Politics: Austro-Marxism and Stalinism on the
National Question," in Richard L. Rudolph and David F. Good, eds., Nationalism and
Empire: The Habsburg Empire and the Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992);
Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964); Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nation-
alism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
7. Stalin, Marksizm i natsionalPnyi vopros, 51. See also V. I. Lenin, Voprosy na-
tsional'noi politiki i proletarskogo internatsionalizma (Moscow: Politizdat, 1965), passim.
8. The "oppressor" was not always "civilized," as in most marxist analyses of
Russia vis-a-vis Poland or Finland.

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What social class could demand self-determination and under what

conditions it could do so were of course matters for vigorous and
ultimately meaningless debate-all the more vigorous and meaningless
because most of the peoples of the Russian Empire had not progressed
very far along the road of capitalist development and thus were not
nations in marxist terms.9 Another acrimoniously fruitless affair was
Lenin's insistence on the political meaning of "self-determination" and
his deathbed dispute with Stalin over its practical implementation
within the Soviet state. Much more significant in the long run was
Lenin's and Stalin's common campaign for a strictly territorial defi-
nition of autonomy, a campaign they waged against Bund and Bauer
but abandoned after 1917 because both sides won (Soviet federalism
combined ethnicity with territory and-at least for the first twenty
years-guaranteed the cultural rights of various leftover diasporas).
The most remarkable aspect of that campaign was the assertion-rarely
challenged either before or after 1917-that all territorial divisions
could be described as either "medieval" or "modern," with modernity
defined as democracy (borders "based on popular sympathies") and
with democracy resulting in "the greatest possible homogeneity in the
national composition of the population." 10 The borders of the socialist
state would be "determined . . . according to the will and 'sympathies'
of the population," and at least some of those sympathies would run
along ethnic lines.11 If this were to breed "national minorities," they,
too, would have their equal status guaranteed.12 And if equal status
(and economic rationality) required the creation of countless "auton-
omous national districts" "of even the smallest size," then such districts
would be created and probably combined "in a variety of ways with
neighboring districts of various sizes." 13
But why set up ethno-territorial autonomies under socialism if most
socialists agreed that federalism was a "philistine ideal," that "national
culture" was a bourgeois fiction and that assimilation was a progressive
process that substituted a "mobile proletarian" for the "obtuse," "sav-
age," "somnolent" peasant "glued to his pile of manure" and beloved
for that very reason by conniving connoisseurs of national culture?14
First of all, because Lenin's socialism did not grow on trees. To bring
it about, Lenin's socialists had to "preach against [slogans of national
9. Stalin, Marksizm, 37. The view of a nation (as opposed to a nationality) as a

"historical category belonging to a particular epoch, the epoch of rising capitalism"
became something of a truism and was reconfirmed without debate at the X Party
Congress.
10. Lenin, "Kriticheskie zametki po natsional'nomu voprosu" (1913), in Voprosy,
32-34.
11. Ibid., 33; and Lenin, "Itogi diskussii o samoopredelenii" (1916), in Voprosy,
128.
12. Lenin, "Kriticheskie zametki," 26.
13. Ibid., 33-34.
14. Ibid., 15, 16; and Lenin, "O prave natsii na samoopredelenie" (1914), in Vo-
prosy, 81 (footnote), and "O natsional'noi gordosti velikorossov" (1914), in Voprosy, 107.

129.67.53.2 on Mon, 01 May 2023 16:58:57 +00:00
418 Slavic Review
culture] in all languages, 'adapting' themselves to all local and national

requirements." 15 They needed native languages, native subjects and
native teachers ("even for a single Georgian child") in order to "po-
lemicize with 'their own' bourgeoisie, to spread anticlerical and anti-
bourgeois ideas among 'their own' peasantry and burghers" and to
banish the virus of nationalism from their proletarian disciples and
their own minds.'6 This was a missionary project analogous to the so-
called "Il'minskii system" formulated in the Kazan' of Lenin's youth. ' 7
"Only the mother tongue," claimed Il'minskii, "can truly, rather than
only superficially, set the people on the path of Christianity." 18 Only
the mother tongue, wrote Stalin in 1913, can make possible "a full
development of the intellectual faculties of the Tatar or of the Jewish
worker." '9 Both theories of conversion assumed that "native language"
was a totally transparent conduit for an apostle's message. Unlike more
"conservative" missionaries, who saw culture as an integral system and
argued that in order to defeat "an alien faith" one had to "struggle
against an alien nationality-against the mores, customs and the whole
of the domestic arrangement of alien life,"20 the Kazan' reformers and
the fathers of the Soviet ethnic policy believed that nationality had
nothing to do with faith. According to Lenin, marxist schools would
have the same marxist curriculum irrespective of the linguistic me-
dium.2' Insofar as national culture was a reality, it was about language
and a few "domestic arrangements": nationality was "form." "National
form" was acceptable because there was no such thing as national
content.
Another reason for Lenin's and Stalin's early defense of national-
ism (defining "nationalism" as a belief that ethnic boundaries are on-
tologically essential, essentially territorial and ideally political22) was
the distinction that they drew between oppressor-nation nationalism
and oppressed-nation nationalism. The first, sometimes glossed as

16. Ibid., 9, 28; and "O prave," 61, 83-84.
17. Isabelle Kreindler, "A Neglected Source of Lenin's Nationality Policy," Slavic
Review 36, no. 1 (March 1977): 86-100.
18. Quoted in Isabelle Kreindler, "Educational Policies toward the Eastern Na-
tionalities in Tsarist Russia: A Study of the Il'minskii System," Ph.D. Diss., Columbia
University, 1969, 75-76.
19. Stalin, Marksizm, 21.
20. Veniamin, Arkhiepiskop Irkutskii i Nerchinskii, Zhiznennye voprosy pravo-
slavnoi missii v Sibiri (St. Petersburg: A. M. Kotomin, 1885), 7. For a discussion of the
controversy, see Yuri Slezkine, "Savage Christians or Unorthodox Russians? The Mis-
sionary Dilemma in Siberia," in Galya Diment and Yuri Slezkine, eds., Between Heaven
and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993),
18-27.
22. Cf. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1983), 1; E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9; John Breuilly, Nationalism and the
State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 3.

129.67.53.2 on Mon, 01 May 2023 16:58:57 +00:00
"great-power chauvinism," was gratuitously malevolent; the second was

legitimate, albeit transitory. The first was the result of unfair size ad-
vantage; the second was a reaction to discrimination and persecution.
The first could only be eliminated as a consequence of proletarian
victory and subsequent self-discipline and self-purification; the second
had to be assuaged through sensitivity and tact.23 Accordingly, the slo-
gans of national self-determination and ethno-territorial autonomy
were gestures of contrition. They came easily and went a long way
insofar as they dealt with "form." "A minority is discontented not
because there is no [extraterritorial] national union but because it does
not have the right to use its native language. Allow it to use its native
language and the discontent will pass by itself."24 The more rights and
opportunities a national minority would enjoy, the more "trust" (do-
verie) it would have in the proletarians of the former oppressor nation.
Genuine equality of "form" would reveal the historically contingent
nature of nationalism and the underlying unity of class content.
Having transformed capitalism into socialism, the proletariat will cre-

ate an opportunity for the total elimination of national oppression; this
opportunity will become a reality "only"-"only"!-after a total de-
mocratization of all spheres, including the establishment of state bor-
ders according to the "sympathies" of the population, and including
complete freedom of secession. This, in turn, will lead in practice to a
total abolition of all national tensions and all national distrust, to an
accelerated drawing together and merger of nations which will result
in the withering away of the state.25
The "practice" of the revolution and civil war did nothing to change
this program. The earliest decrees of the new bolshevik government
described the victorious masses as "peoples" and "nations" endowed
with "rights," 26 proclaimed all peoples to be equal and sovereign, guar-
anteed their sovereignty through an ethnoterritorial federation and a
right to secession, endorsed "the free development of national minor-
ities and ethnic groups," and pledged to respect national beliefs, cus-
toms and institutions.27 By the end of the war the need for local allies
and the recognition of existing (and sometimes ethnically defined)
entities combined with principle to produce an assortment of legally
recognized (and increasingly ethnically defined) Soviet republics, au-
tonomous republics, autonomous regions and toilers' communes. Some
autonomies appeared more autonomous than others but "nationality"
23. Lenin, "O natsional'noi programme RSDRP" (1913), in Voprosy, 41; idem, "O
prave," 61-62, 102; idem, "Sotsialisticheskaia revoliutsiia i pravo natsii na samo-
opredelenie" (1916), in Voprosy, 113-14.
24. Stalin, Marksizm, 163. The same applied to national schools, freedom of reli-
gion, freedom of movement and so on.
25. Lenin, "Itogi diskussii o samoopredelenii" (1916), in Voprosy, 129.
26. "Peoples" and "nations" were used interchangeably.
27. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1957), 1: 39-41, 113-15, 168-
70, 195-96, 340-44, 351, 367.

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420 Slavic Review
reigned supreme. "Many of these peoples have nothing in common

except the fact that before they were all parts of the Russian Empire
and now they have all been liberated by the revolution, but there are
no internal connections among them."28 According to Lenin's para-
dox, the surest way to unity in content was diversity in form. By "fos-
tering national cultures [nasazhdat' natsional'nuiu kul'turu]" and creating
national autonomies, national schools, national languages and national
cadres, the bolsheviks would overcome national distrust and reach na-
tional audiences. "We are going to help you develop your Buriat, Vo-
tiak, etc. language and culture, because in this way you will join the
universal culture [obshchechelovecheskaia kul'tura], revolution and com-
munism sooner." 29
To many communists this sounded strange. Did nations not consist
of different classes? Should not proletarian interests prevail over those
of the national(ist) bourgeoisie? Were not the proletarians of all coun-
tries supposed to unite? And were not the toilers of the besieged Soviet
state supposed to unite with all the more determination? In spring
1918 M. I. Latsis attacked the "absurdity of federalism" and warned
that the endless "breeding of republics," particularly in the case of
"undeveloped ethnic groups" such as the Tatars or the Belorussians,
was as dangerous as it was ludicrous.30 In winter 1919 A. A. Joffe cau-
tioned against growing nationalist appetites and appealed for the "end
of separatism" on the part of the "buffer republics." 31 And in spring
1919, at the VIII Party Congress, N. I. Bukharin and G. L. Piatakov
launched an all-out assault against the slogan of national self-deter-
mination and the resulting primacy of ethnicity over class in non-
Russian areas.32
Lenin's response was as adamant as it was familiar. First, nations
existed "objectively." "If we say that we do not recognize the Finnish
nation but only the toiling masses, it would be a ridiculous thing to
say. Not to recognize something that is out there is impossible: it will
force us to recognize it."33 Second, former oppressor nations needed
to gain the trust of the former oppressed nations.
The Bashkirs do not trust the Great Russians because the Great Rus-
sians are more cultured and used to take advantage of their culture
to rob the Bashkirs. So in those remote places the name "Great Rus-
sian" stands for "oppressor" and "cheat." We should take this into
account. We should fight against this. But it is a long-term thing. It
28. S. Dimanshtein, "Narodnyi komissariat po delam natsional'nostei," Zhizn'nat-

sional'nostei 41 (49) (26 October 1919).
29. S. Dimanshtein, "Sovetskaia vlast' i melkie natsional'nosti," Zhizn' na-
tsionalPnostei 46 (54) (7 December 1919). See also S. Pestkovskii, "Natsional'naia kul'tura,"
Zhizn' natsional'nostei 21 (29) (8 June 1919).
30. A. P. Nenarokov, K edinstvu ravnykh: Kul'turnyefaktory ob"edinitelPnogo dvizheniia
sovetskikh narodov, 191 7-1924 (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 91-92.
31. Ibid., 92-93.
32. Vos'moi s"ezd RKP(b): Protokoly (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1959), 46-48, 77-81.
33. Ibid., 55.

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cannot be abolished by decree. We should be very careful here. And

a nation like the Great Russians should be particularly careful because
they have provoked such bitter hatred in all the other nations.34
Finally, backward nations had not developed a "differentiation of the

proletariat from bourgeois elements" and thus could not be expected
to have revolutionary classes consistently hostile "to their mullahs."35
Taken as a whole and compared to more "cultured" nations, however,
they were legitimate proletarians by virtue of having been cheated and
oppressed. Under imperialism ("as the highest and final stage of cap-
italism") colonial peoples had become the global equivalents of the
western working class. Under the dictatorship of the (Russian) prole-
tariat, they were entitled to special treatment until the economic and
psychological wounds of colonialism had been cured. Meanwhile, na-
tions equaled classes.
Lenin lost the argument but won the vote because, as Tomskii put
it, while "not a single person in this room would say that national self-
determination or national movements were either normal or desira-
ble," most people seemed to believe that they were a "necessary evil"
that had to be tolerated.36 Accordingly, the scramble for national status
and ethnoterritorial recognition continued unimpeded. The Kriashen
were different from the Tatars in customs, alphabet and vocabulary,
and thus needed a special administrative unit.37 The Chuvash were
poor and did not speak Russian, and thus needed a special adminis-
trative unit.38 The Jakut deserved their own government because they
lived compactly and were ready to "organize their lives through their
own efforts."39 The "primitive tribes" who lived next to the Jakut de-
served a special government because they lived in widely dispersed
communities and were not ready to run their own affairs.40 The Eston-
ian settlers in Siberia had a literary tradition and needed a special
bureaucracy to provide them with newspapers.4' The Ugrian natives
34. Ibid., 106.

35. Ibid., 53. In the same speech, Lenin argued that even the most "advanced"
western countries were hopelessly behind Soviet Russia in terms of social differentia-
tion (which meant that they could-and sometimes should-be regarded as integral
nations rather than as temporarily isolated class battlefields). By being Soviet, Russia
was more advanced than the advanced west.
36. Ibid., 82.
37. Fedor Kriuchkov, "O Kriashenakh," Zhizn' natsionaltnostei 27 (84) (2 September
1920).
38. R. El'mets, "K voprosu o vydelenii chuvash v osobuiu administrativnuiu edi-
nitsu," Zhizn' natsionalPnostei 2 (59) (11 January 1920).
39. V. Vilenskii (Sibiriakov), "Samoopredelenie iakutov," Zhizn' natsionaltnostei 3
(101) (2 February 1921).
40. V. G. Bogoraz-Tan, "O pervobytnykh plemenakh," Zhizn'natsionaltnostei 1 (130)
(10 January 1922); idem, "Ob izuchenii i okhrane okrainnykh narodov," Zhizn' na-
tsionaltnostei 3-4 (1923): 168-177; Dan. lanovich, "Zapovedniki dlia gibnu-
shchikh tuzemnykh plemen," Zhizn' natsionalUnostei 4 (133) (31 January 1922); TsGAOR,
f. 1377, op. 1, d. 8,11. 126-27, d. 45, 11. 53, 77, 81.
41. "Chetyre goda raboty sredi estontsev Sovetskoi Rossii," Zhizn' natsional'nostei
24 (122) (5 November 1921).

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422 Slavic Review
of Siberia had no literary tradition and needed "an independent gov-

ernment" to "direct at the dark masses a ray of enlightenment and to
cultivate their way of life [kul'tivirovat' ikh byt zhizni]."42 Local intellec-
tuals, Commissariat of Nationalities officials, "native conferences" and
Petrograd ethnographers all demanded institutional autonomy, offices
and funding (for themselves or their proteges). Having received auton-
omy, they demanded more offices and more funding.
Funding was scarce, but autonomous areas and offices were becom-
ing ever more plentiful. In addition to ethnoterritorial units, complete
with their own bureaucracies and (in theory, at least) "mother-tongue"
education, there were national units within national units, national
sections in party cells and local soviets, and national quotas in colleges.
In 1921 Poles received 154,000 newly published books in their lan-
guage while the half-recognized Kriashen received 10; the Azerbaijani
Communist Party had Iranian, German, Greek and Jewish sections; the
Comissariat of Enlightenment in Moscow had 14 national bureaus; and
103 local party organizations in Russia were supposed to transact their
business in Estonian.43
Some doubts persisted. According to one Commissariat of Nation-
alities official, linguistic self-assertion might not work for those nation-
alities that were "weak, backward and dispersed in the sea of some
advanced culture." Therefore, "the tendency to preserve and develop
one's native language at all costs and ad infinitum, with the sole pur-
pose of creating a symmetrical, geometrically complete system of ed-
ucation in a single language, does not have a future and does not take
into account all the complexity and diversity of the socio-cultural com-
position of our age." 44 Others argued that the age was primarily about
economic rationality and that ethnic units should be superceded, or
at least complemented, by scientifically defined economic entities based
on environmental, industrial and commercial affinity. If military dis-
tricts could cut across national borders, so should economic ones.45
Such arguments were not simply rejected. Starting in 1922 they
became ideologically unacceptable. Lenin's passion, Stalin's Narkom-
nats bureaucracy, the tradition of party decisions and the vested in-
terests of proliferating ethnic institutions had congealed into a "na-
tionality question" that could no longer be questioned, so that when
the X Party Congress legitimized the policy of institutionalized ethnic-
ity, no one called it a "necessary evil," let alone bourgeois nationalism.
What the X Congress (and specifically Stalin) did was to conflate Len-
in's themes of national oppression and colonial liberation, equate the
42. TsGAOR, f. 1318, op. 1, d. 994, 1. 100.

43. See Zhizn' natsionalPnostei (1921) and TsGAOR, f. 1318.
44. L. Segal', "Vserossiiskoe soveshchanie rabotnikov po prosveshcheniiu naro-
dov ne-russkogo iazyka," Zhizn' natsional'nostei 33 (41) (31 August 1919).
45. I. Trainin, "Ekonomicheskoe raionirovanie i natsional'naia politika," Zhizn'
natsional'nostei 21 (119) (10 October 1921); S. K., "Ekonomicheskoe raionirovanie i
problemy avtonomno-federativnogo stroitel'stva," Zhizn' natsionaltnostei 25 (123) (12
November 1921).

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''nationality question" with the question of backwardness and present

the whole issue as a neat opposition between "Great Russians" and
"non-Great Russians." The Great Russians belonged to an advanced,
formerly dominant nation possessed of a secure tradition of national
statehood and frequently guilty of ethnic arrogance and insensitivity
known as "great-power chauvinism." All the other nationalities, de-
fined negatively and collectively as "non-Great Russians," were victims
of tsarist-imposed statelessness, backwardness and "culturelessness
[nekul'turnost1," which made it difficult for them to take advantage of
new revolutionary opportunities and sometimes tempted them to en-
gage in "local nationalism."46 In Stalin's formulation, "the essence of
the nationality question in the RSFSR consists of the need to eliminate
the backwardness (economic, political and cultural) that the national-
ities have inherited from the vast, to allow the backward peoples to
catch up with central Russia."4 To accomplish this goal, the Party was
to help them
a) develop and strengthen their own Soviet statehood in a form that

would correspond to the national physiognomy of these peoples; b)
introduce their own courts and agencies of government that would
function in native languages and consist of local people familiar with
the life and mentality of the local population; c) develop their own
press, schools, theaters, local clubs and other cultural and educational
institutions in native languages.48
There were to be as many nation states with varying degrees of auton-

omy as there were nationalities (not nations!) in the RSFSR. Nomads
would receive lands lost to the Cossacks and "national minorities"
scattered among compact ethnic groups would be guaranteed "free
national development" (which called for the creation of territorial
units).49 Perhaps most remarkably, this triumph of ethnicity was pre-
sented by Stalin as both the cause and the consequence of progress.
On the one hand, "free national development" was the only way to
defeat non-Russian backwardness. On the other,
You cannot go against history. Even though the Russian element still
predominates in Ukrainian cities, it is clear that as time goes on these
cities will inevitably become Ukrainianized. About forty years ago
Riga was a German city, but as cities grow at the expense of villages,
and villages are the keepers of nationality, Riga is now a purely Lat-
vian city. About fifty years ago all cities of Hungary were German in
character, but now they have been Magyarized. The same will happen
to Belorussia, in whose cities non-Belorussians currently predomi-
nate.50
46. Desiatyi s"ezd Rossiiskoi Kommunisticheskoi partii: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow:

Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1921), 101.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 371.
49. Ibid., 372.
50. Ibid., 115.

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424 Slavic Review
Once this had happened, the Party would redouble its efforts at nation
building because, "in order to conduct communist work in the cities,
it will be necessary to reach the new proletarian-Belorussian in his
native language." 51
However "dialectical" the logic of the official policy, its practice
was unequivocal and, by 1921, fairly well established. In a sense, the
introduction of the New Economic Policy at the X Congress was tan-
tamount to the "lowering" of all other pursuits to the level of the
already "NEP-like" nationality policy. NEP constituted a temporary but
deliberate reconciliation with "backwardness"-backwardness repre-
sented by peasants, traders, women, all non-Russian peoples in general
and various "primitive tribes" in particular. There was a special wom-
en's department, aJewish section and the Committee for Assistance to
the Peoples of the Northern Borderlands, among others. Backwardness
endlessly multiplied itself and each remnant of the past required an
individual approach based on "specific peculiarities" and character-
ized by sensitivity and paternal benevolence. The ultimate goal was
the abolition of all backwardness and thus all difference, but the ful-
fillment of that goal was postponed indefinitely. Attempts to force it
through would be "dangerous" and "utopian"-as was the impatience
of those otherwise "mature and politically aware comrades" in central
Asia who asked, "What on earth is going on? How much longer are we
going to keep breeding separate autonomies?"52 The Party's answer
was the vague but emphatic: "For as long as it takes." For as long as it
takes to overcome "economic and cultural backwardness . . . , economic
differences, differences in customs (particularly important among na-
tions that have not yet reached the capitalist stage) and linguistic dif-
ferences." 53 Meanwhile, nation building appeared to be a praiseworthy
goal in its own right. There was beauty in difference.
With one exception. One particular remnant of the past had few
redeeming qualities and was to be tolerated but not celebrated, used
but not welcomed. This was the Russian peasant. The NEP alliance
(smychka) between the peasantry and the working class seemed to mir-
ror similar arrangements with other "underdeveloped" groups but its
official rationale was quite different. The "peasant element" was ag-
gressive, contagious and menacing. No one assumed that its brand of
savagery would dialectically dissolve itself through further develop-
ment because the stubbornly "somnolent" Russian peasant was incap-
able of development as a peasant (his was a difference "in content"). By
equating ethnicity with development and dividing the population of
the country into Russians and non-Russians, the X Congress recognized
and reinforced this distinction. The Russian nationality was developed,
51. "Belorusskii natsional'nyi vopros i kommunisticheskaia partiia," Zhizn' na-

tsional'nostei 2 (131) (17 January 1922).
52. Vareikis and Zelenskii, Natsional'no-gosudarstvennoe razmezhevanie, 57.
53. Ibid., 60. "Nations that have not yet reached the capitalist stage" were not
nations according to Stalin's definition.

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dominant and thus irrelevant. The Russian territory was "unmarked"

and, in effect, consisted of those lands that had not been claimed by
the non-Russians known as "nationals [natsionaly]." Miko-
yan's objection that this was too neat, that Azerbaijan was culturally
and economically "ahead of many Russian provinces" and that the
Armenian bourgeoisie was as imperialistic as any was dismissed by
Stalin and by the congress.54
"Lenin's last struggle" with the nationality question did not change
the official line.55 Upset by the alleged "Great-Russian chauvinism" of
Stalin, Dzerzhinskii and Ordzhonikidze ("Russians" by behavior and
profession, if not by national origin), the ailing leader recommended
more of the same medicine. Internationalism on the part of the Rus-
sians "should consist not only in the formal equality of nations, but
also in the kind of inequality at the expense of the big oppressor nation
that would compensate for the de facto inequality that exists in life." 56
This called for more-much more-"caution, deference and conces-
sions" with regard to the "'offended' nationals," more conscious (and
hence non-chauvinist) proletarians in the Russian apparatus, and more
emphasis on the wide and consistent use of non-Russian languages.57
In April 1923 the XII Party Congress duly reaffirmed this view without
questioning either the old strategy or the new urgency (the only del-
egate to challenge the national development orthodoxy was a self-de-
scribed "rank-and-file worker" who timidly mentioned Marx's cosmo-
politan proletarians and was chided by Zinov'ev58). At the two extremes
of expert opinion, Stalin argued that Russian chauvinism constituted
"the main danger" ("nine tenths of the problem"), while Bukharin in-
sisted that it was the only danger.59 Solutions to the problems of na-
tional representation and ethnoterritorial federation varied but the
principles of the "leninist nationality policy" remained the same. (Sta-
lin's "autonomization plan" called for greater centralization in "every-
thing essential" but took it for granted that such nonessential matters
as "language" and "culture" were to be left to the "genuine internal
autonomy of the republics." 60) Even the noisy discussion of the Geor-
gian affair had little to add to the issue, with the "offended nationals"
complaining of insensitivity and the "great-power chauvinists" point-
ing to the dominance of the Georgian language and the remarkable
successes of nationality-based preferential promotion (according to
54. Desiatyi s"ezd, 112, 114.

55. For two different interpretations, see Moshe Lewin, Lenin's Last Struggle (New
York: Pantheon, 1968); and Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism
and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954).
56. V. I. Lenin, "K voprosu o natsional'nostiakh i1i ob 'avtonomizatsii,"' in Voprosy,
167.
57. Ibid., 168-70.
58. Dvenadtsatyi s"ezd Rossiiskoi Kommunisticheskoi partii (bol'shevikov). Ste-
nograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Glavpolitprosvet, 1923), 462, 552.
59. Ibid., 439-54, 561-65.
60. Quoted in Nenarokov, K edinstvu, 116-17.

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426 Slavic Review
Ordzhonikidze, Georgians made up 25% of the overall population of

Tiflis but 43% of the city soviet, 75% of the city executive committee,
91% of the presidium of the executive committee, and 100% of both
the republican Sovnarkom and the Central Committee of the Party).61
The only truly theoretical innovation introduced at the congress was
not discussed as such and proved short-lived: defending himself against
Lenin's epistolary accusations, Stalin took up Mikoyan's old position
and attempted to deprive the Russians of their monopoly on imperi-
alism and to redefine "local nationalism" as great-power chauvinism
writ small. Georgians oppressed Abkhazians and Ossetians, Azeris bul-
lied Armenians, Uzbeks ignored the Turkmen and so on. In fact, Sta-
lin's main argument against Georgia's secession from the
Transcaucasian Federation was the alleged campaign by Georgian of-
ficials to deport local Armenians and "transform Tiflis into a real Geor-
gian capital."62 This meant that the Ukrainization of Kiev and the
Belorussification of Minsk might not be such a good idea after all, but
the majority at the congress either did not get Stalin's meaning or
chose to ignore it. "Great-power chauvinism" was clearly reserved for
the Russians, "local nationalism" had to be anti-Russian to be a danger
(not the "main danger" perhaps but dangerous enough to the perpe-
trators) and national territories belonged to those nationalities whose
names they bore.
But what was "nationality"? At the time of the February revolution,
the only characteristic ascribed to all imperial subjects was "religious
confession," with both the Russian national identity and the tsar's dy-
nastic legitimacy largely associated with Orthodoxy. Not all of the tsar's
subjects and not all Orthodox believers were Russians, but all Russians
were expected to be Orthodox subjects of their Orthodox tsar. The
non-Orthodox could serve the tsar in his capacity as emperor, but they
had no immunity from occasional conversion campaigns and were
legally handicapped in cases of mixed marriages. Some non-Orthodox
were legally designated as "aliens" (inorodtsy), a term whose etymology
("non-kin," "non-native") suggested genetic difference but which was
usually interpreted to mean "non-Christian" or "backward." These two
concepts reflected the Muscovite ("premodern") and petrine ("mod-
ern") notions of otherness and were now used interchangeably. Some
baptized communities were too backward to be "real Christians" and
all aliens were formally classified according to their religion ("Muslim,"
"Lamaist") or "way of life" understood as degree of development ("set-
tled," "nomadic," "wandering"). With the spread of state-sponsored
education and the attendant effort to reach the "eastern aliens"63 and
to control (and Russify) the autonomous educational institutions of
western non-Russians, "native language" also became a politically
meaningful category. The names of languages, however, did not always
61. Dvenadtsatyi s"ezd, 543-45.

62. Ibid., 449.
63. See, for example, "S" ezd po narodnomu obrazovaniiu," Zhurnal Ministerstva
narodnago prosvieshcheniia L (March-April 1914): 195, 242-44.

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coincide with the collective names that variously defined communities

used to refer to themselves and to others. On the eve of the revolution,
Russia had census nationalities, nationalist parties and national "ques-
tions," but it had no official view of what constituted nationality.
On the eve of the February revolution (exactly one day before
Nicholas II left for Mogilev and the locked-out Putilov workers poured
into the streets of Petrograd), President of the Russian Academy of
Sciences S. F. Ol'denburg wrote to Minister of Foreign Affairs N. N.
Pokrovskii that, moved by a "sense of patrotic duty," he and his col-
leagues would like to propose the formation of a Commission for the
Study of the Tribal Composition of the Russian Borderlands.
The most thorough determination of the tribal composition of the

areas lying on both sides of Russia's borders with hostile states is of
extraordinary importance at the present moment because a world war
is being waged to a considerable extent over the national question.
The determination of the validity of various territorial claims by var-
ious nationalities will become particularly important at the time of
peace negotiations because, even if new borders are drawn in accor-
dance with certain strategic and political considerations, the national
factor will still play an enormously important role.64
Under the Provisional Government the nationality question moved

farther inland and the new commission was charged with the study of
the whole population of Russia, not just the borderlands. Under the
bolsheviks "the essence of Soviet nationality policy" came to consist
in the "coincidence of ethnographic and administrative borders,"65
which meant that most of the imperial territory would have to be
divided into borderlands and that professional ethnographers would
have to play an important role in the endeavor.
There was no time to discuss terminology. Aliens and Christians
were replaced by an undifferentiated collection of narody (peoples),
narodnosti (peoples sometimes understood to be small or underdevel-
oped), natsional'nosti (nationalities), natsii (nations) and plemena (tribes).
There was no agreement as to how durable (and hence territorially
viable) these entities were. In what seems to have been a common
attitude, the head of the commission's Caucasian section, N. Ia. Marr,
considered nationality to be too "transitory" and too complex to be
pinned down by "primitive territorial demarcation," but worked hard
(a lot harder than most, in fact) to uncover "primeval ethnicity [etni-
cheskaia pervobytnost']" and "true tribal composition."66 The most com-
64. Ob uchrezhdenii Komissii po izucheniiu plemennogo sostava naseleniia Rossii. Izvestiia

Kommissii po izucheniiu plemennogo sostava naseleniia Rossii (Petrograd: Rossiiskaia Aka-
demiia Nauk, 1917), 1: 8.
65. I. Gertsenberg, "Natsional'nyi printsip v novom administrativnom delenii
RSFSR," Zhizn' natsionalUnostei 37 (94) (25 November 1920).
66. N. Ia. Marr, Plemennoi sostav naseleniia Kavkaza: Trudy Komissii po izu-
cheniiu plemennogo sostava naseleniia Rossii (Petrograd: Rossiiskaia Akademiia nauk, 1920),
3: 9, 21-22. See also N. Ia. Marr, "Ob iafeticheskoi teorii," Novyi vostok 5 (1924): 303-
9.

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428 Slavic Review
monly used "marker of tribal composition" was language. Party ideo-

logues championed "native-language education" as the basis for their
nationality policy; education officials proceeded from a "linguistic def-
inition of national culture";67 and ethnographers tended to fall back
on language as the most dependable, albeit not universal, indicator of
ethnicity. Thus, E.F. Karskii, the author of Ethnographic Map of the
Belorussian Tribe, adopted mother tongue as "the exclusive criterion"
of national difference and claimed, in a characteristic non sequitur,
that Lithuanians who spoke Belorussian should be considered Belo-
russians.68 More controversially, the central Asian Sart (usually
as settled Muslims) were decreed out of existence, the various Pamir
communities became "Tajiks" and the Uzbeks were radically redefined
to include most of the Turkic speakers of Samarkand, Tashkent and
Bukhara.69 Yet language was still perceived to be insufficient and the
1926 census included two unequal categories of "language" and "na-
tionality," revealing large numbers of people who did not speak "their
own language." Such communities were considered "denationalized"
by ethnographers70 and not entirely legitimate by party officials and
local elites: Russian-speaking Ukrainians or Ukrainian-speaking Mol-
davians were expected, and sometimes forced, to learn their mother
tongue irrespective of whether their mothers knew how to speak it.
What made "denationalized" Ruritanians Ruritanians? More often
than not, it was the various combinations of "material life," "customs"
and "traditions" jointly known as "culture." Thus, when dealing with
areas where "Russian" and "Belorussian" dialects blend into each other,
Karskii distinguished between the two nationalities by referring to dif-
ferences in clothing and architecture.71 Similarly, Marr classified Ira-
nian-speaking Ossetians and Talysh as north Caucasians (Japhetids)
on the basis of their "ethnic culture," "genuine popular religion,'' "way
of life [byt]" and "emotional attachment to the Caucasus." 72 Sometimes
67. "The richest associations and the strongest perceptions are those acquired
through the mother tongue" (Segal', "Vserossiiskoe soveshchanie").
68. E. F. Karskii, Etnograficheskaia karta Bielorusskago plemeni: Trudy Komissii po izu-
cheniiu plemennogo sostava naseleniia Rossii, vol. 2 (Petrograd: Rossiiskaia Akademiia nauk,
1917).
69. I. I. Zarubin, Spisok narodnostei Turkestanskogo kraia: Trudy Komissii po izucheniiu
plemennogo sostava naseleniia Rossii, vol. 9 (Leningrad: Rossiiskaia Akademiia nauk, 1925);
I. I. Zarubin, Naselenie Samarkandskoi oblasti: Trudy Komissii po izucheniiu plemennogo sos-
tava naseleniia Rossii, vol. 10 (Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1926); Edward A. Allworth, The
Modern Uzbeks: From the Fourteenth Century to the Present (Stanford: Hoover Institution
Press, 1990), 181; Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in
the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1967), 131-33; Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, Russia
and Nationalism in Central Asia: The Case of Tadzhikistan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1970), 78.
70. Instruktsiia k sostavleniiu plemennykh kart, izdavaemykh Komissieiu po izucheniiu
plemennogo sostava naseleniia Rossii: Trudy Komissii po izucheniiu plemennogo sostava naselen-
iia Rossii (Petrograd: Rossiiskaia Akademiia nauk, 1917), 1: 11.
71. Karskii, Etnograficheskaia karta, 19.
72. N. Ia. Marr, Plemennoi sostav naseleniia Kavkaza: Trudy Komissii po izu-

129.67.53.2 on Mon, 01 May 2023 16:58:57 +00:00
religion-as-culture outweighed language and became a crucial ethnic

marker in its own right, as when the Kriashen (Tatar-speaking Chris-
tians) received their own "department" and the Adzhar (Georgian-
speaking Muslims) received their own republic (a similar appeal by
Marr on behalf of Muslim, Armenian-speaking Khemshil proved
unsuccessful73). Cultures, religions and indeed languages could be rein-
forced by topography (highland versus valley Caucasians) and chro-
nological primacy (in the Caucasian case, a native-versus-settler dis-
tinction did not necessarily coincide with a dichotomy based on prog-
ress, as it did in Siberia74). Physical ("racial," "somatic") type was never
used independently but sometimes-particularly in Siberia-was used
to support other distinguishing features.75 Finally, none of these fea-
tures could be decisive in the case of the steppe nomads, whose "na-
tional awareness" or "tribal self-identity" were considered so strong as
to make any other criteria practically useless. Linguistic, cultural and
religious differences among the Kazakh, Kirgiz and Turkmen might be
negligible, but their clan geneologies were so clearly drawn and so
vigorously upheld that most ethnographers had no choice but to fol-
low.76
To be sure, the actual borders of new ethnic units did not always
correspond to those suggested by scholars. Kazakh authorities de-
manded Tashkent, Uzbek authorities wanted autonomy for the Osh
district and the Central Committee in Moscow formed special arbitra-
tion commissions.
Subsequently the Kirgiz [i.e., Kazakh] abandoned their claims on Tash-

kent but became all the more insistent in their demand that three
volosts ... of the Tashkent uezd be included in Kazakhstan. If this
demand had been fully satisfied, the portions of the canals ... that
feed Tashkent would have wound up on Kirgiz territory... Besides,
the adoption of the Kirgiz variant would have cut the central Asian
railway line by a Kirgiz wedge 17 versts south of Tashkent.77
Such odd strategic or "national interest" considerations (as in Kazakh

versus Uzbek), as well as more conventional political and economic
priorities at various levels affected the final shape of ethnoterritorial
units, but there is no doubt that the dominant criterion was indeed
ethnic. "Nationality" meant different things in different areas but the
9: 24-25; N. Ia. Marr, Talyshi: Trudy Komissii po izucheniiu plemennogo sostava naseleniia
Rossii (Petrograd: Rossiiskaia Akademiia nauk, 1922), 4: 3-5, 22.
73. Marr, Plemennoi sostav, 9.
74. Ibid., 59-61. Cf. S. K. Patkanov, Spisok narodnostei Sibiri: Trudy Komissii po izu-
7: 3.
75. See, for example, Patkanov on "Paleoasiatics" in Patkanov, Spisok, 8.
76. VI. Kun, "Izuchenie etnicheskogo sostava Turkestana," Novyi vostok 6 (1924):
351-53; Zarubin, Spisok, 10.
77. I. Khodorov, "Natsional'noe razmezhevanie Srednei Azii," Novyi vostok 8-9
(1926): 69.

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430 Slavic Review
borders of most areas were seen as truly "national" and were, indeed,
remarkably similar to ethnographic maps drawn up by the Commission
for the Study of Tribal Composition. Bolshevik officials in Moscow saw
the legitimation of ethnicity as a concession to ethnic grievances and
developmental constraints, not as a brilliant divide-and-rule stratagem,
and confidently asserted, after Lenin and Stalin, that the more genuine
the "national demarcation" the more successful the drive to interna-
tionalism.
In the short run, national demarcation resulted in a puzzling and
apparently limitless collection of ethnic nesting dolls. All non-Russians
were "nationals" entitled to their own territorial units and all nation-
ally defined groups living in "somebody else's" units were national
minorities entitled to their own units. By 1928, various republics con-
tained national okrugs, national raions, national soviets, native execu-
tive committees (tuzriki), native soviets (tuzemnye sovety), aul (aul'nye) so-
viets, clan (rodovye) soviets, nomadic (kochevye) soviets and encampment
committees (lagerkomy).78 Secure within their borders, all Soviet nation-
alities were encouraged to develop and, if necessary, create their own
autonomous cultures. The key to this effort was the widest possible use
of native languages-"native language as a means of social discipline,
as a social unifier of nations and as a necessary and most important
condition of successful economic and cultural development." 9 Both
the main reason for creating a national autonomy and the principal
means of making that autonomy truly national, "native language" could
refer to the official language of a given republic (almost always indi-
cated by the republic's name80), to the official language of a given
minority unit or to the mother tongue of particular individuals. The
proliferation of territorial units seemed to suggest that eventually there
would be an official language for most individuals, even if it resulted
in state-sponsored trilingualism (in 1926 Abkhaz-speaking Abkhazia,
itself a part of Georgian-speaking Georgia, had 43 Armenian, 41 Greek,
27 Russian, 2 Estonian and 2 German schools81). To put it differently,
all 192 languages identified during the 1920s would sooner or later
become official.
78. See, for example, S. Dimanshtein, "Desiat' let natsional'noi politiki partii i
sovvlasti," Novyi vostok 19 (1927): vi; "Vremennoe polozhenie ob upravlenii tuzemnykh
narodnostei i plemen Severnykh okrain," Severnaia Aziia 2 (1927): 85-91; N. I. Leonov,
"Tuzemnye sovety v taige i tundrakh," Sovetskii Sever: Pervyi sbornik statei (Moscow:
Komitet Severa, 1929), 225-30; Zvi Y. Gitelman,Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The
Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972),
289; Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union:
From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 58.
79. I. Davydov, "O probleme iazykov v prosvetitel'noi rabote sredi natsional'-
nostei," Prosveshchenie natsional'nostei 1 (1929): 18.
80. After the abolition of the "Highland" (Gorskaia) republic, the only autono-
mous republic that had no ethnic "landlord" and hence no obvious official language
was Dagestan, one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth (see A. Takho-
Godi, "Problema iazyka v Dagestane," Revoliutsiia i natsionalVnosti 2 [1930]: 68-75).
81. V. A. Gurko-Kriazhin, "Abkhaziia," Novyi vostok 13-14 (1926): 115.

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To become official, however, a language had to be "modernized."

This involved the creation or further codification of a literary standard
based on "live popular speech," rendered through a "rational" pho-
netic alphabet (all Arabic and some Cyrillic writing systems were aban-
doned in favor of Latin) and "purged of alien ballast."82 A purge-or
institutionalized linguistic purism-was important because if nation-
alities were by definition culturally different (in form) and if language
was "the most important characteristic that distinguished one nation-
ality from another," then languages had to become as different as pos-
sible.83 Local intellectuals encouraged by central authorities (or, when
these were unavailable, metropolitan scholars jealous for "their peo-
ples") set out to draw linguistic borders. The inventors of literary Uz-
bek and Tatar declared war on "Arabisms and Farsisms," the framers
of standard Ukrainian and Belorussian campaigned against "Russ-
isms," and the protectors of the eliteless "small peoples" liberated the
newly codified Chukchi language from English borrowings. The first
two of the five theses adopted by Tatar writers and journalists read as
follows:
I. The principal material of the Tatar literary language should

consist of elements taken from the native language. If a needed word
exists in the Tatar language, it can under no circumstances be re-
placed by a foreign equivalent.
II. If a word does not exist in the Tatar language, it should, when-
ever possible, be replaced
a) by a new artificial word composed of stems (roots) that exist
in our language;
b) by a borrowing from among old-Turkish words that are no

longer in use or from the vocabularies of related Turkish tribes that
reside on Russian territory provided they will be accepted and easily
assimilated.85
Duly codified and apparently insulated from each other (not least
by means of dictionaries86), the various official languages could be used
to reach the "toiling nationals." By 1928, books were being published
in 66 languages (as compared to 40 in 1913) and newspapers in 47
82. See, in particular, William Fierman, Language Planning and National Develop-
ment: The Uzbek Experience (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991); and Simon Crisp, "Soviet
Language Planning since 1917-53," in Michael Kirkwood, ed., Language Planning in the
Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 23-45. The quote is from Agamaly-
ogly, "K predstoiashchemu tiurkologicheskomu s" ezdu v Azerbaidzhane," Novyi vostok
10-11 (1925): 216.
83. Davydov, "O probleme iazykov," 18.
84. See, for example, Fierman, Language Planning, 149-63;James Dingley, "Ukrai-
nian and Belorussian-A Testing Ground," in Kirkwood, ed., Language Planning, 180-
83; V. G. Bogoraz-Tan, "Chukotskii bukvar'," Sovetskii Sever 10 (1931): 126.
85. I. Borozdin, "Sovremennyi Tatarstan," Novyi vostok 10-11 (1925): 132.
86. M. Pavlovich, "Kul'turnye dostizheniia tiurko-tatarskikh narodnostei so vre-
meni Oktiabr'skoi revoliutsii," Novyi vostok 12 (1926): viii.

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432 Slavic Review
(205 non-Russian titles in all87). How many people were actually read-
ing them was not of immediate importance: as in other Soviet cam-
paigns, supply was supposed to generate demand (or suppliers would
engineer it). Much more ambitious was the requirement that all official
business including education be conducted in native languages (the
languages of the eponymous republics as well as the languages of local
communities).88 This was necessary because Lenin and Stalin kept say-
ing it was necessary, because it was the only way to overcome national
mistrust, because "speech reactions in native languages occur more
quickly," 89 because socialist content was only accessible to nationals in
national form, because "developed" nations consisted of individuals
whose native language equaled the official language equaled the na-
tion's name, and because the adoption of rigid literary standards had
created large numbers of people who either spoke non-languages or
spoke their native languages "incorrectly."90 By 1927, 93.7 percent of
Ukrainian and 90.2 percent of Belorussian elementary-school students
were taught in their "native" languages (that is, the language implied
by the name of their "nationality").91 High schools, vocational schools
and colleges lagged behind, but everyone seemed to agree that the
ultimate goal was a total coincidence of national and linguistic identity.
Theoretically at least, ajew from a shtetl was to be educated in Yiddish
even if his parents preferred Ukrainian (Hebrew not being an option),
while a Ukrainian from Kuban' was to be taught in Ukrainian if schol-
ars and administrators decided that her parents' vernacular was a di-
alect of Ukrainian rather than a dialect of Russian (or a Kuban' lan-
guage in its own right).92 As one official put it, "We cannot take the
desires of parents into account. We must teach the child in the lan-
guage he speaks at home."93 In many parts of the USSR such an ap-
proach could not be implemented or even seriously argued, but the
validity of the final goal (total ethnolinguistic consistency under so-
cialism rather than total ethnolinguistic transparency under commu-
nism) was usually taken for granted.
Finally and most dramatically, the promotion of native languages
was accompanied by the promotion of the speakers of those languages.
87. Simon, Nationalism, 46. The number of Yiddish books and brochures, for
example, rose from 76 in 1924 to 531 in 1930 (see Gitelman,Jewish Nationality, 332-
33).
88. See, for example, Fierman, Language Planning, 170-76; Gitelman, Jewish Na-
tionality, 351-65; James E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation:
National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard Ukrainian Re-
search Institute, 1983), 96; Simon, Nationalism, 42.
89. Davydov, "O probleme iazykov," 23.
90. The Ukrainian Commissar of Education, Mykola Skrypnyk, defined the Don-
bass vernacular as a "neither Russian nor Ukrainian" patois in need of proper Ukrai-
nianization (see Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas, 213).
91. Simon, Nationalism, 49.
92. I. Bulatnikov, "Ob ukrainizatsii na Severnom Kavkaze," Prosveshchenie na-
tsional'nostei 1 (1929): 94-99; Gitelman,Jewish Nationality, 341-44.
93. Gitelman,Jewish Nationality, 342.

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According to the official policy of korenizatsiia (literally, "taking root"

or indigenization), the affairs of all ethnic groups at all levels-from
union republics to clan soviets-were to be run by the representatives
of those ethnic groups. This involved the preferential recruitment of
"nationals" to party, government, judicial, trade union and educational
institutions, as well as the preferential "proletarianization" of mostly
rural non-Russian populations.94 The specific goals were not clear,
however. On the one hand, an ethnic group's share of the total pop-
ulation on a given territory was to be equal to its share in all high-
status occupations, which in effect meant all occupations with the ex-
ception of traditional rural ones (precisely those that, according to
ethnographers, made most nationalities "national").95 On the other
hand, not all territories were equal or equally self-contained, with the
"republican" identity frequently dominating over all others. Indeed,
most indigenization campaigns assumed republic-controlling (non-
Russian) nationalities to be more indigenous than others, so that if the
share of Armenian office-holders actually exceeded the share of Ar-
menians in the total population of "their own" republic, no one seemed
to allege a violation of the Soviet nationality policy (the Kurds were
to control their own village soviets; their proportionate representation
on the republican level was not a clearly stated priority).96 No other
union republic could equal Armenia's success but most of them tried
(with Georgia making particularly great strides). Nationality was an
asset and there were no nationally defined entities above the union
republic.
Yet even though administrative hierarchy tended to interfere with
the principle of national equality, the idea of a formal ranking of
ethnic groups was absent from the NEP nationality policy. No one
bothered with Stalin's distinction between nations and nationalities,
least of all Stalin himself. The dictatorship of the proletariat consisted
of countless national groups (languages, cultures, institutions) en-
dowed with apparently limitless national-that is, "nonessential"-
rights (to develop their languages, cultures, institutions). The key
themes were "national diversity [raznoobrazie]" and "national unique-
ness [svoeobrazie]," both useful as paradoxical prerequisites for ultimate
unity but also as values in their own right. The symbolic representation
of the USSR at the Agricultural Exhibit of 1923 included
The majestic ancient mosques of Samarkand ..; the white minarets

of Azerbaijan; a colorful Armenian tower; a strikingly Oriental build-
ing from Kirghizia; a solid Tatar house covered with grillwork; some
picturesque chinoiserie from the far east; and further on the yurts
and chums from Bashkiria, Mongol-Buriatia, Kalmykia, Oiratia, Ia-
kutia, the Khakass, the Ostiak and the Samoed; all of it surrounded
94. For a survey, see Simon, Nationalism, 20-70.

95. See, for instance, Borozdin, "Sovremennyi Tatarstan," 118-19; 122-23; Di-
manshtein, "Desiat' let," v-vi, xvii.
96. Simon, Nationalism, 32-33, 37.

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434 Slavic Review
by the artificially created mountains and villages of Dagestan, Cau-

casian Highland [Gorskaia] Republic, and Chechnia ... They each have
their own flag; signs in their own language; maps of their own expanses
and borders; diagrams of their own riches. Nationality, individuality
and uniqueness are forcefully emphasized everywhere.97
If the USSR was a communal apartment, then every family that

inhabited it was entitled to a room of its own. "Only through free
national self-determination could we arrive in this apartment," argued
Vareikis, "for only because of this self-determination can any formerly
oppressed nation shed its legitimate mistrust of larger nations."98
Not all mistrust was legitimate, of course. The failure to recognize
Moscow as "the citadel of the international revolutionary movement
and leninism"99 (and thus the only true center of democratic central-
ism) was a nationalist deviation, as Sultan-Galiev and Shums'kyi, among
others, had a chance to find out. National rights were matters of cul-
tural "form" as distinct from political and economic "content"; but
ultimately all form was derived from content and it was up to party
leaders in Moscow to decide where the line should be drawn in each
case. One thing was clear, however: the distinction itself remained
obligatory, albeit temporary, and the share of form remained signifi-
cant, although theoretically negligible. Even as he attacked Mykola
Khvyl'ovyi in 1926 for turning "away from Moscow," Stalin reiterated
his support for the further development of Ukrainian culture and re-
peated his 1923 prediction that eventually (as opposed to right now)
"the Ukrainian proletariat would be Ukrainianized in the same way in
which the proletariat of, say, Latvia and Hungary, which used to be
German, had been Latvianized and Magyarized." 100
But what about the Russians? In the center of the Soviet apartment
there was a large and amorphous space not clearly defined as a room,
unmarked by national paraphernalia, unclaimed by "its own" nation
and inhabited by a very large number of austere but increasingly sen-
sitive proletarians. The Russians, indeed, remained in a special posi-
tion. They could be bona fide national minorities in areas assigned to
somebody else, but in Russia proper they had no national rights and
no national opportunities (because they had possessed and misused
them before). The war against Russian huts and Russian churches was
the Party's raison d'etre, and the heavy burden of that war was the
reason it needed the support of the yurts, chums and minarets. In fact,
ethnicity-based affirmative action in the national territories was an
exact replica of class-based affirmative action in Russia. A Russian could
benefit from being a proletarian; a non-Russian could benefit from
being a non-Russian. "Udmurt" and "Uzbek" were meaningful con-
97. A. Skachko, "Vostochnye respubliki na S.-Kh. Vystavke SSSR v 1923 godu,"

Novyi vostok 4 (1923): 482-84. Emphasis in the original.
98. Vareikis and Zelenskii, Natsional no-gosudarstvennoe razmezhevanie, 59.
99. Stalin, Sochineniia, 8: 153.
100. Ibid., 151.

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cepts because they substituted for class; "Russian" was a politically

empty category unless it referred to the source of great-power chau-
vinism (which meant arrogant bureaucratic statism, not excessive na-
tional self-assertion) or to the history of relentless imperialist oppres-
sion (which meant that the tsarist state was a prison for non-Russian
peoples). In Trotsky's March 1923 formulation of Lenin's policy,
The relationship between the Great Russian proletariat and the Great-
Russian peasantry is one thing. Here the question is one of class, pure
and simple, which makes the solution of the problem easier. The
relationship between the Great Russian proletariat, which plays first
fiddle in our federal state, and the Azerbaijani, Turkestani, Georgian
and Ukrainian peasantry is something else entirely.10'
The Russians were not the only non-nation in the Soviet Union.
The Soviets were not a nation either (the apartment was not larger
than the sum total of its rooms). This is all the more remarkable be-
cause after March 1925 the citizens of the USSR were building social-
ism "in one country"-a country with a central state, a centralized
economy, a definite territory and a monolithic Party. Some people
("great-power chauvinists") associated that country with Russia'02 but
as far as the party line was concerned, the USSR had no national
identity, no official language and no national culture. The USSR was
like Russia insofar as both represented pure "socialist content" com-
pletely devoid of "national form."
One could not criticize socialist content, of course, but the cam-
paign to foster national forms had numerous, though mostly inarti-
culate, detractors. While almost none of the delegates to the XII Con-
gress spoke out against the Lenin/Stalin indigenization (koreniza-
tsiia) program, the greatest applause was reserved for the few attacks
on "local nationalism," not for the Party's crusade against great-power
chauvinism.'03 Meanwhile, in the Tatar Republic great-power chauvin-
ism consisted in complaints "that 'all the power is in Tatar hands these
days'; that 'Russians are badly off now'; that 'Russians are being op-
pressed'; that 'Russians are being fired from their jobs, not hired any-
where, and not admitted to colleges'; that 'all Russians should leave
Tataria as soon as possible,' etc." 104 In Povolzh'e, Siberia and central
Asia, "non-native" settlers, teachers and administrators resented offi-
cial pressure to learn languages they considered useless, hire "nation-
als" they deemed incompetent, teach children they called "savage" and
waste scarce resources on projects they regarded as unfair tokenism.105
101. Quoted in Nenarokov, K edinstvu ravnykh, 132.

102. See, in particular, M. Agurskii, Ideologiia natsional-bol'shevizma (Paris: YMCA
Press, 1980).
103. Dvenadtsatyi s"ezd, 554, 556, 564.
104. N. Konoplev, "Shire front internatsional'nogo vospitaniia," Prosveshchenie
natsional'nostei 2 (1931): 49. See also N. Konoplev, "Za vospitanie internatsional'nykh
boitsov," Prosveshchenie natsional'nostei 4-5 (1930): 55-61.
105. TsGAOR, f. 1377, op. 1, d. 224, 11. 8, 32; N. Amyl'skii, "Kogda zatsvetaiut
zharkie tsvety," Severnaia Aziia 3 (1928): 57-58; Fierman, Language Planning, 177-85; N.

129.67.53.2 on Mon, 01 May 2023 16:58:57 +00:00
436 Slavic Review
Ukrainian peasants were not enthusiastic about the arrival of Jewish

agricultural colonists, while the "overrepresented" Jewish officials ob-
jected to wholesale Ukrainianization.106 The presumed beneficiaries
were not always grateful, either. "Politically immature" parents, stu-
dents and teachers exibited an "abnormal attitude" towards native-
language education and had to be forced along the path of "Yiddish-
ization" and "Belorussification" (for technical reasons, this path rarely
stretched beyond middle school and thus appeared to be an educa-
tional dead end).'07 "Backward" Belorussian settlers in Siberia pre-
ferred instruction in Russian, while "particularly backward" indige-
nous peoples of Siberia argued that insofar as literacy was of any value
in the tundra, it was to get to know the Russian ways and learn the
skills that could not be mastered at home.108
While NEP lasted, these arguments fell on deaf ears because the
correct way out of backwardness lay through exuberant and uncom-
promising nation building (natsional'noe stroitel'stvo)-that is, in official
terminology, through more backwardness. But in 1928 NEP came to
an end and so did the toleration of all "survivals." The "revolutionaries
from above" restored the original bolshevik equation of "otherness"
with "backwardness" and vowed to destroy it within ten years. Collec-
tivization would take care of rural barbarians, industrialization would
bring about urban progress and the cultural revolution would "liqui-
date illiteracy" (and thus all deviance). According to the apostles of
the Great Transformation, "socialism in one country" meant that the
difference between self and other would soon coincide with the bor-
ders of that country: all internal boundaries would presently disappear,
schools would merge with production, writers with readers, minds with
bodies. But did any of this apply to nationalities? Did this mean that
national territories were a concession to backwardness that had to be
withdrawn? That nations were to be eliminated like NEPmen or col-
lectivized like peasants? Some serious signs pointed in that direction.
I. Leonov, "Tuzemnye shkoly na Severe," Sovetskii Sever: Pervyi sbornik statei (Moscow:
Komitet Severa, 1929), 200-4; Leonov, "Tuzemnye sovety," 242, 247-48; D. F. Med-
vedev, "Ukrepim sovety na Krainem Severe i ozhivim ikh rabotu," Sovetskii Sever 1
(1933): 6-8; P. Rysakov, "Praktika shovinizma i mestnogo natsionalizma," Revoliutsiia
i natsional'nosti 8-9 (1930): 28; T. Semushkin, Chukotka (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1941),
48; I. Sergeev, "Usilit' provedenie natspolitiki v Kalmykii," Revoliutsiia i na-
tsionalPnosti 7 (1930): 66; Simon, Nationalism, 25, 41, 73-74.
106. Gitelman,Jewish Nationality, 386, 398, 402-3.
107. Davydov, "O probleme iazykov," 22; Konoplev, "Shire front," 50; A. Valitov,
"Protiv opportunisticheskogo otnosheniia k stroitel'stvu natsshkoly," Prosveshchenie na-
tsional'nostei 5-6 (1932): 68.
108. I. Skachkov, "Prosveshchenie sredi belorusov RSFSR," Prosveshchenie na-
tsionalUnostei 3 (1931): 76; P. Kovalevskii, "V shkole-iurte," Sovetskii Sever 2 (1934): 105-
6; I. Nesterenok, "Smotr natsional'nykh shkol na Taimyre," Sovetskii Sever 6 (1932): 84;
G. N. Prokof'ev, "Tri goda v samoedskoi shkole," Sovetskii Sever 7-8 (1931): 144; S.
Stebnitskii, "Iz opyta raboty v shkole Severa," Prosveshchenie natsional'nostei 8-9 (1932):
49-51.

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Just as legal scholars anticipated the withering away of law and teachers
predicted the imminent obsolescence of formal education, linguists
and ethnographers expected-and tried to bring about-the fusion
and consequent disappearance of linguistic and ethnic communities.109
According to N. Ia. Marr's allegedly marxist and hence obligatory 'ja-
phetic theory," language belonged to a social superstructure and thus
reflected the cyclical changes of the economic base. Language families
were remnants of evolutionary stages united by the inexorable process
of global "glottogony" and were destined to become merged under
communism.110 Similarly, the speakers of those languages ("nationali-
ties") constituted historically "unstable" communities that rose and fell
with socio-economic formations:"' "By freeing itself from its bour-
geois aspect, national culture will become fused into one human cul-
ture... The nation is a historic, transitional category that does not
represent anything primeval or eternal. Indeed, the process of the
evolution of the nation essentially repeats the history of the develop-
ment of social forms." 112 In the meantime, the need to speed up the
study of marxism-leninism and "master technology" seemed to require
both the abandonment of the ''preposterous" practice of linguistic
indigenization among mostly "assimilated" groups and the encourage-
ment of the widest possible use of the Russian language."13
This was not to be, however. Linguistic purism did come under
attack from the marrists and later the Party,"14 but the issue was not
officially resolved until 1933-1934 and the principle of ethnocultural
autonomy was never put into question. As Stalin declared to the XVI
Party Congress in July 1930,
The theory of the fusion of all nations of ... the USSR into one
common Great Russian nation with one common Great Russian lan-
guage is a nationalist-chauvinist and anti-leninist theory that contra-
dicts the main thesis of leninism, according to which national differ-
ences cannot disappear in the near future but will remain in existence
109. For professional abolitionism during the first five-year plan, see Sheila
Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1978). On linguistics and ethnography, see Yuri Slezkine, "The Fall of
Soviet Ethnography, 1928-38," Current Anthropology 32, no. 4 (1991): 476-84.
110. Slezkine, "The Fall," 478.
111. N. Ia. Marr, "K zadacham nauki na sovetskom vostoke," Prosveshchenie na-
tsional'nostei 2 (1930): 12; S. Asfendiarov, "Problema natsii i novoe uchenie o iazyke,"
Novyi vostok 22 (1928): 174.
112. Asfendiarov, "Problema natsii," 174.
113. I. Davydov, "Ocherednye zadachi prosveshcheniia natsional'nostei," Pro-
sveshchenie natsional'nostei 4-5 (1930): 30-34; M. Vanne, "Russkii iazyk v stroitel'stve
natsional'nykh kul'tur," Prosveshchenie natsional'nostei 2 (1930): 31-40.
114. I. Kusik'ian, "Ocherednye zadachi marksistov-iazykovedov v stroitel'stve ia-
zykov narodov SSSR," Prosveshchenie natsional'nostei 11-12 (1931): 75; E. Krotevich, "Vy-
pravit' nedochety v stroitel'stve Kazakhskoi terminologii," Prosveshchenie na-
tsional'nostei 8-9 (1932): 94-96; Fierman, Language Planning, 126-129; Mace, Communism,
277-79; Roman Smal-Stocki, The Nationality Problem of the Soviet Union and Russian Com-
munist Imperialism (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1952), 106-41.

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438 Slavic Review
for a long time, even after the victory of the proletarian revolution
on a world scale.115
Accordingly, for as long (very long) as "national differences, lan-

guage, culture, ways of life, etc." remained in existence, the ethno-
territorial entities would have to be preserved and reinforced.'16 The
Great Transformation in nationality policy consisted in a dramatic
escalation of the NEP nation-building drive. The champions of the
Russian language were forced to recant17 and all of Soviet life was to
become as "national" as possible as quickly as possible. If there were
no fortresses that the bolsheviks could not storm, no plan that they
could not overfulfill and no fairy tale that they could not turn into
reality, then surely it would not take more than a few months to master
Uzbek, let alone the "mere 600 to 700 everyday words" that made up
the Nenets language."18 On 1 March 1928 the Central Asian Bureau of
the Party, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbek-
istan and the Uzbek Executive Committee formally decided to become
fully "Uzbekified" by 1 September 1930.119 On 28 December 1929 the
Uzbek government required that all officials of the Central Committee,
Supreme Court and commissariats of labor, enlightenment, justice and
social welfare learn the Uzbek language within two months (the other
commissariats were given nine months and "everyone else" a year).120
On 6 April 1931 the Central Executive Committee of the Crimean
Autonomous Republic decreed that the share of indigenous govern-
ment officials be raised from 29 to 50 percent by the end of the year.'21
And on 31 August 1929 the predominantly Russian-speaking residents
of Odessa woke up to discover that their daily Izvestiia had been trans-
formed into the Ukrainian-language Chornomors 'ka komuna.1 22
Only cities, however, were expected to become fully Ukrainianized
or Kazakhified. The most spectacular aspect of the Stalin revolution
among nationalities was the vastly increased support for the cultural
autonomy of all "national minorities" (non-titular nationalities), how-
ever small. "The essence of indigenization does not fully coincide with
such concepts as Ukrainianization, Kazakhization, Tatarization, etc....
Indigenization cannot be limited to issues relating only to the indig-
115. I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow: Politizdat, 1952), 13: 4. Emphasis in the

original.
116. Ibid., 12: 365-66.
117. See, for example, Prosveshchenie natsional'nostei 11-12 (1931): 102-6.
118. Fierman, Language Planning, 177; Evgen'ev and Bergavinov, "Nachal'niku Ob-
dorskogo politotdela Glavsevmorputi t. Mikhailovu," Sovetskaia Arktika 4 (1936):
65-67.
119. P. Rysakov, "Praktika shovinizma i mestnogo natsionalizma," Revoliutsiia i
natsionalhnosti 8-9 (1930): 29.
120. S. Akopov, "K voprosu ob uzbekizatsii apparata i sozdanii mestnykh rabo-
chikh kadrov promyshlennosti Uzbekistana," Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti 12 (1931):
22-23.
121. B. Rodnevich, "Korenizatsiia apparata v avtonomiiakh i raionakh nats-
men'shinstv RSFSR," Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti 12 (1931): 19-20.
122. Mace, Communism, 212. See also Simon, Nationalism, 39-40.

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enous nationality of a given republic or province." 123 By 1932 Ukraine

could boast of Russian, German, Polish, Jewish, Moldavian, Chechen,
Bulgarian, Greek, Belorussian and Albanian village soviets, while Ka-
zakhstan hosted Russian, Ukrainian, "Russo-Cossack," Uzbek, Uigur,
German, Tajik, Dungan, Tatar, Chuvash, Bulgarian, Moldavian and
Mordvinian rural soviets, not counting 140 that were "mixed." 124 It
was a feast of ethnic fertility, an exuberant national carnival sponsored
by the Party and apparently reaffirmed by Stalin's attack on Rosa Lux-
emburg in his letter to Proletarskaia revoliutsiia.'25 It turned out that the
Chechen and Ingush were different nationalities (and not all Vainakh
speakers), that Mingrelians were different from Georgians, that Karels
were different from Finns, that the "Pontus Greeks" were different
from the "Ellas Greeks," that the Jews and Gypsies were different (but
not that different) from everybody else and that therefore all of them
urgently needed their own literary languages, presses and education
systems.126 Between 1928 and 1938 the number of non-Russian news-
papers increased from 205 titles in 47 languages to 2,188 titles in 66
languages.127 It was considered a scandal if north Caucasians of Ukrain-
ian origin did not have their own theaters, libraries and literary or-
ganizations, if the peoples of Dagestan had a Turkic lingua franca (as
opposed to several dozen separate standards), or if the cultural needs
of the Donbass workers were being served "only in the Russian, Ukrain-
ian and Tatar languages." 128 Most official positions and school admis-
sions in the Soviet Union were subject to complex ethnic quotas that
aimed at a precise correspondence between demography and promo-
tion-an almost impossibly confusing task given the number of ad-
ministrative levels at which demography and promotion could be
measured.129 The dictatorship of the proletariat was a Tower of Babel
123. A. Oshirov, "Korenizatsiia v sovetskoi strane," Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti

4-5 (1930): 111.
124. A. Gitlianskii, "Leninskaia natsional'naia politika v deistvii (natsional'nye
men'shinstva na Ukraine)," Revoliutsiia i natsionalPnosti 9 (1931): 37; A. Zuev, "Natsmeny
Kazakhstana," Revoliutsiia i natsionaltnosti 4 (1932): 48.
125. Or so most people thought. Cf. Stalin, Sochineniia 13: 91-92 and Revoliutsiia
i natsionalhnosti 1 (1932); and Iiul'skii, "Pis'mo t. Stalina-orudie vospitaniia
Bol'shevistskikh kadrov," Prosveshchenie natsionaltnostei 2-3 (1932): 9.
126. See for example I. K., "Indoevropeistika v deistvii," Prosveshchenie na-
tsional'nostei 11-12 (1931): 97-102; I. Kusik'ian, "Protiv burzhuaznogo kavkazovede-
niia," Prosveshchenie natsional'nostei 1 (1932): 45-47; I. Zhvaniia, "Zadachi sovetskogo i
natsional'nogo stroitel'stva v Mingrelii," Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti 7 (1930): 66-72; D.
Savvov, "Za podlinno rodnoi iazyk grekov Sovetskogo Soiuza," Prosveshchenie na-
tsionalPnostei 4 (1932): 64-74; M. Bril', "Trudiashchiesia tsygane v riady stroitelei so-
tsializma," Revoliutsiia i natsionalUnosti 7 (1932): 60-66; S. D., "Evreiskaia avtonomnaia
oblast'-detishche Oktiabr'skoi revoliutsii," Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti 6 (1934): 13-25.
127. Siimon, Nationalism, 46.
128. Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti 1 (1930): 117; A. Takho-Godi, "Problema iazyka v
Dagestane," Revoliutsiia i natsionallnosti 2 (1930): 68-75; Gitlianskii, "Leninskaia na-
tsional'naia politika," 77.
129. See, for example, G. Akopov, "Podgotovka natsional'nyklh kadrov," Revoliu-
tsiia i natsionalPnosti 4 (1934): 54-60; A. Polianskaia, "Natsional'nye kadry Belorussii,"

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440 Slavic Review
in which all tongues on all floors would have a proportionate share of

all jobs. Even shock-worker detachments at individual factories and
construction sites were to be organized along ethnic lines if at all
possible (the famous female Stakhanovite, Pasha Angelina, was a proud
member of the "Greek brigade").130
The Great Transformation was not just NEP gone berserk, however.
In nationalities policies as much as any other, it represented the last
war against backwardness-as-exploitation, a permanent escape from
social (and hence all?) difference, and the final leap into timelessness
conceived as classlessness. Great Transformation goals and identities
were valid only if they were obstructed by villains. Starting in 1928,
real or imaginary non-Russian elites could no longer claim nationwide
backwardness or nationwide rights. Collectivization presupposed the
existence of classes and that meant that all nationalities without ex-
ception had to produce their own exploiters, heretics, and anti-Soviet
conspirators.131 (If classes could not be found, gender and age suf-
ficed.132) Life consisted of "fronts" and fronts-including the national
one-separated warring classes. "If in the case of the Russian nation-
ality the internal class struggle has been extremely acute from the very
first days of October. . ., the various nationalities are only now begin-
ning to engage in [it]...." 133 Indeed, sometimes the social corrective
to the ethnic principle seemed to dissolve that principle altogether, as
when a prominent party spokesman declared that "the intensification
of class conflicts reveal[ed] the class essence of many national pecu-
Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti 8-9 (1930): 79-88; Rodnevich, "Korenizatsiia apparata";

Zuev, "Natsmeny"; E. Popova, "Korenizatsiia apparata-na vysshuiu stupen'," Revo-
liutsiia i natsional'nosti 7 (1932): 50-55; I. Iuabov, "Natsmeny Uzbekskoi SSR," Revoliu-
tsiia i natsionalPnosti 9 (1932): 74-78; P. S-ch, "Partorganizatsii natsional'nykh raionov,"
Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti 10-11 (1932): 143-48; I. Karneev, "Nekotorye tsifry po pod-
gotovke inzhenerno-tekhnicheskikh kadrov iz korennykh natsional'nostei," Revoliutsiia
i natsional'nosti 3 (1933): 86-92.
130. Kh. Khazanskii, I. Gazeliridi, "Kul'tmassovaia rabota sredi natsional'nykh
men'shinstv na novostroikakh," Revoliutsiia i natsionaltnosti 9 (1931): 86-91; A. Ka-
chanov, "Kul'turnoe obsluzhivanie rabochikh-natsmen Moskovskoi oblasti," Revoliu-
tsiia i natsionalPnosti 6 (1932): 54-58; I. Sabirzianov, "Natsmenrabota profsoiuzov
Moskvy," Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti 9 (1932): 69-74.
131. A. Mitrofanov, "K itogamn partchistki v natsrespublikakh i oblastiakh," Re-
voliutsiia i natsional'nosti 1 (1930): 29-36; Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Stanford:
Hoover Institution Press, 1987), 216-20; Mace, Communism, 264-80; Rakowska-Harmn-
stone, Russia and Nationalism, 39-41; Azade-Ayse Rorlich, The Volga Tatars: A Profile in
National Resilience (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 155-56.
132. In other words, women and children could become default proletarians. See
Gregory Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in
Soviet Central Asia, 1919-1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); Yuri Slez-
kine, "From Savages to Citizens: The Cultural Revolution in the Soviet Far North,
1928-1938," Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 52-76.
133. "Vskrytie klassovoi rozni." See N. Krupskaia, "O zadachakh natsional'no-
kul'turnogo stroitel'stva v sviazi s obostreniem klassovoi bor'by," Prosveshchenie na-
tsional'nostei 4-5 (1930): 19.

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liarities," 134 or when a young ethnographer/collectivizer concluded that

the whole "system that impress[ed] the superficial and usually naive
observer as a national peculiarity ... turn[ed] out to be a system of
ideological defense of private property." 135
Not all national peculiarities could be dissolved by class analysis,
however. The rhetoric of ethnic diversity and the practice of ethnic
quotas remained obligatory, and most local officials purged during the
first five-year plan were replaced by their social betters from the same
nationality.'36 What did change was the amount of room allowed for
"national form." The ethnic identity of the Great Transformation was
the ethnic identity of NEP minus "backwardness" as represented and
defended by the exploiting classes. The members of the so-called Union
for the Liberation of Ukraine were accused of nationalism not because
they insisted on Ukraine's separate identity, administrative autonomy
or ethnolinguistic rights-that was the official Soviet policy. They were
accused of nationalism because the Ukraine they allegedly defined and
celebrated was a rural Utopia from the remote but recoverable past,
not an urban Utopia from the near but ethnically fragmented future.
They remained emotionally attached to the old Ukraine dotted with

farmsteads and manor houses, a predominantly agrarian country with
a solid base for the private ownership of land.... They were hostile
to the industrialization of Ukraine and to the Soviet five-year plan,
which was transforming the republic and endowing it with an inde-
pendent industrial base. They sneered [glumilis'] at the Dnieper Hy-
droelectric Dam and at Soviet Ukrainianization. They did not trust
its sincerity and seriousness. They were convinced that without them,
without the old Ukrainian intelligentsia, no genuine Ukrainianization
was possible. But more than anything else they were afraid that their
monopoly on culture, literature, science, art and the theater would
be wrested from them.137
The continued existence of nationally defined communities and the

legitimacy of their claims to particular cultural, territorial, economic
and political identities (which Stalin regarded as the principle of na-
tional rights and which I call "nationalism") was never in doubt. The
crime of ",bourgeois nationalism" consisted in attempts by some "bour-
geois intellectuals" to lead such communities away from the party
line-in the same way as the crime of wrecking consisted in the at-
tempts by some "bourgeois specialists" to derail Soviet industry. To
engage in "bourgeois nationalism" was to sabotage a nation, not to
"build" it.
134. S. Dimanshtein, "Za klassovuiu chetkost' v prosveshchenii natsional'nostei,"

Prosveshchenie natsional'nostei 1 (1929): 9.
135. N. Bilibin, "U zapadnykh koriakov," Sovetskii Sever 1-2 (1932): 207.
136. See, for example, Olcott, The Kazakhs, 219; Rakowska-Harmstone, Russia and
Nationalism, 100-1.
137. D. Zaslavskii, "Na protsesse 'vyzvolentsev,"' Prosveshchenie natsional'nostei 6
(1930): 13.

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442 Slavic Review
In 1931 the "socialist offensive" began to wane and in 1934 it was

effectively halted for lack of an adversary. Addressing the "Congress
of Victors," Stalin declared that the USSR had finally "divested itself
of everything backward and medieval" and become an industrialized
society based on a solid socialist foundation.'38 For purposes of official
representation, time had been conquered and the future had become
present. All essential differences had been overcome, all scholarly pur-
suits had become marxist and all non-marxist pursuits had disap-
peared. In the absence of backwardness, there was no need for the
institutions that had been created to deal with its various manifesta-
tions: the Women's Department, the Jewish Section, and the Commit-
tee for the Assistance to the Peoples of the Northern Borderlands had
all been closed down. The science of pedology had been banned be-
cause it claimed that women, minorities and the socially disadvantaged
might need special assistance along the path to modernity. The science
of ethnology had been banned because it assumed that some contem-
porary cultures might still be primitive or traditional. And all non-
socialist-realist art had been banned because all art reflected reality
and all Soviet reality was socialist.
According to the X Congress's equation of nationality with back-
wardness, nationality would have had to be banned, too. Once again,
however, it weathered the storm and re-emerged chastened but vigor-
ous. "High stalinism" did not reverse the policy of nation building, as
most authors on the subject would have us believe.'39 It changed the
shape of ethnicity but it never abandoned the "leninist principle" of
unity through diversity. It drastically cut down on the number of na-
tional units but it never questioned the national essence of those units.
The abolition of the Central Asian Bureau was no more a call for ethnic
assimilation than the abolition of the Women's Department was a pre-
lude to an attack on gender differences. In fact, just as the newly eman-
cipated Soviet women were expected to become more "feminine," the
fully modernized Soviet nationalities were supposed to become more
national. Class was the only legitimate kind of "content" and by the
late 1930s class-based quotas, polls and identity cards had been dis-
continued.'40 Differences "in form" remained acceptable, however, and
nationality (the most venerable and certifiably hollow form of "form")
was allowed to develop, regroup and perhaps even acquire a little
content.
The most striking innovation of the early 1930s was the emergence
138. Stalin, Sochineniia, 13: 306, 309.

139. For two remarkable exceptions, see Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver,
"Equality, Efficiency, and Politics in Soviet Bilingual Education Policy, 1934-1980,"
American Political Science Review 78, no. 4 (October 1984): 1019-39; and Ronald Grigor
Suny, "The Soviet South: Nationalism and the Outside World," in Michael Mandel-
baum, ed., The Rise of Nations in the Soviet Union (New York: Council of Foreign Rela-
tions Press, 1991): 69.
140. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 235.

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of the Russians as an ethnic group in their own right. As class criteria

became irrelevant, the former default nationality became almost as
saturated with ethnicity as all others. The noun "national" was criti-
cized and later killed because there were no "non-nationals" left."4'
First cautiously but then more and more forcefully as the decade pro-
gressed, the Party began to endow Russians with a national past, na-
tional language and an increasingly familiar national iconography,
headed principally by Alexander Pushkin-progressive and "freedom-
loving" to be sure, but clearly celebrated as a great Russian, not a great
revolutionary. By 1934, "derussifying" Russian proletarians and delib-
erately pulling away from Moscow in the course of "cultural construc-
tion" had become a serious crime, not a "mistake" born of well inten-
tioned impatience.'42 And yet, the Russians never became a nationality
like any other. On the one hand, they did not have a clearly defined
national territory (RSFSR remained an amorphous "everything else"
republic and was never identified with an ethnic or historic "Russia"),
they did not have their own Party and they never acquired a national
Academy. On the other hand-and this, of course, explains the la-
cunae-the Russians were increasingly identified with the Soviet Union
as a whole. Between 1937 and 1939 Cyrillic replaced Latin in all the
literary standards created in the 1920s, and in 1938, after a three-year
campaign, Russian became an obligatory second language in all non-
Russian schools. The Soviet past was becoming progressively more Rus-
sian and so were the upper echelons of the Party and state.'43 "Inter-
nationalism," defined as close ties among Soviet nationalities, and later
"friendship of the peoples," defined as even closer ties among Soviet
nationalities, became official dogmas'44 and both could only be ex-
pressed in Russian, the Soviet lingua franca. Still, no one ever sug-
gested that there existed a "Soviet nation" (natsiia, that is, as opposed
to the ethnically non-specific narod) or that Russian should become the
first language in all national areas or institutions. Even in Karelia, where
in 1938 the local Finnish standard was discovered to be "fascist," the
orphaned Finnic-speakers were forced to switch to the newly-codified
"Karelian" rather than Russian, which had already become "the lan-
guage of interethnic communication." "145 The Russians began to bully
their neighbors and decorate their part of the communal apartment
141. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s"ezd sovetskikh pisatelei. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Khu-
dozhestvennaia literatura, 1934), 625.
142. Compare, for example, Stalin, Sochineniia, 8: 149-54; and S. Dimanshtein,
"Bol'shevistskii otpor natsionalizmu," Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti 4 (1933): 1-13; S. D.,
"Bor'ba s natsionalizmom i uroki Ukrainy," Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti 1 (1934):
15-22.
143. Simon, Nationalism, 148-55.
144. After Stalin's speeches at the XVII party Congress and at the Conference of
the Leading Collective Farmers of Tajikistan and Turkmenistan (see Stalin, Sochine-
niia, 13: 361; 14 [1]: 114-115).
145. Paul M. Austin, "Soviet Karelian: The Language That Failed," Slavic Review
51, no. 1 (Spring 1992), esp. 22-23.

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444 Slavic Review
(which included the enormous hall, corridor and the kitchen where all
the major decisions were made), but they did not claim that the whole
apartment was theirs or that the other (large) families were not entitled
to their own rooms. The tenants were increasingly unequal but reas-
suringly separate.
The culture of the Great Transformation had been, by definition,
rootless, fluid and carnivalesque. Old people acted like adolescents,
children acted up, women dressed like men (although not vice versa),
classes changed places and words lost meaning. People, buildings, lan-
guages and nationalities endlessly multiplied, migrated and spread
evenly and thinly over a leveled, decentered landscape. But this pro-
letarian postmodernism proved premature. The Great Retreat of the
1930s was the revenge of the literal-the triumph of real korenizatsiia,
as in "taking root" or "radicalization." The forces of gravity (in both
senses) pinned buildings to the ground, peasants to the land, workers
to factories, women to men and Soviets to the USSR.'46 At the same
time and in the same basic way, each individual got stuck with a na-
tionality and most nationalities got stuck with their borders. In the
early 1930s, at the time of the reappearance of college admissions tests
and shortly before the introduction of student files (lichnye dela), em-
ployee cards (trudovye knizhki) and the death penalty for attempted
flight abroad, all Soviet citizens received internal passports that for-
mally defined them in terms of name, time and place of birth, author-
ized domicile (propiska) and nationality. One's name and propiska could
be changed, nationality could not. By the end of the decade every
Soviet child inherited his nationality at birth: individual ethnicity had
become a biological category impervious to cultural, linguistic or geo-
graphical change.'47 Meanwhile, collective ethnicity was becoming
more and more territorial. The administrative units created just a few
years before in order to accommodate pre-existing nationalities were
now the most important defining feature of those nationalities. To cite
a typical and perfectly circular argument, "The fact that an ethnic
group has its own national territory-a republic, province, district or
village soviet-is proof that the ethnic group in question is an officially
recognized nationality.... For example, the existence, in Cheliabinsk
province, of a Nagaibak national district makes it imperative that a
special nationality, the Nagaibak, be distinguished from the Tatars." 148
In the same way, theJews became a true nation after the creation
of the Jewish Autonomous district in Birobidzhan.
By acquiring their own territory, their own statehood, the toilingJews

of the USSR received a crucial element that they had lacked before
146. This is, in effect, a crude summary of Vladimir Papernyi's delightful Kul'tura
Dva (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985).
147. On the "passport system," see Victor Zaslavsky, The Neo-Stalinist State (Ar-
monk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1982), 92ff.
148. L. Krasovskii, "Chem nado rukovodstvovat'sia pri sostavlenii spiska narod-
nostei SSSR," Revoliutsiia i natsionalUnosti 4 (1936): 70-71.

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and that had made it impossible for them to be considered a nation

in the scientific sense of the term. And so it happened that, like many
other Soviet nationalities completing the process of national consol-
idation, the Jewish national minority became a nation as a result of
receiving its own national administrative entity in the Soviet Union.'49
This view refers to two important innovations. First, the formal

ethnic hierarchy was back for the first time since 1913. Different ethno-
territorial units (republics, provinces, districts) had always had differ-
ent statuses, but no serious attempt had been made to relate this bu-
reaucratic arrangement to an objective and rigidly evolutionary hier-
archy of ethnicity. After the mid-1930s students, writers and shock-
workers could be formally ranked-and so could nationalities. Second,
if the legitimacy of an ethnic community depended on the govern-
ment's grant of territory, then the withdrawal of that grant would au-
tomatically "denationalize" that community (though not necessarily its
individual passport-carrying members!). This was crucial because by
the second half of the decade the government had obviously decided
that presiding over 192 languages and potentially 192 bureaucracies
was not a very good idea after all. The production of textbooks, teach-
ers and indeed students could not keep up with formal "nationaliza-
tion," the fully bureaucratized command economy and the newly cen-
tralized education system required manageable and streamlined
communication channels, and the self-consciously Russian "promo-
tees" who filled the top jobs in Moscow after the Great Terror were
probably sympathetic to complaints of anti-Russian discrimination
(they themselves were beneficiaries of class-based quotas). By the end
of the decade most ethnically defined soviets, villages, districts and
other small units had been disbanded, some autonomous republics
forgotten and most "national minority" schools and institutions closed
down. 150
However-and this is the most important "however" of this essay
-the ethnic groups that already had their own republics and their
own extensive bureaucracies were actually told to redouble their efforts
at building distinct national cultures. Just as the "reconstruction of
Moscow" was changing from grandiose visions of refashioning the
whole cityscape to a focused attempt to create several perfect arti-
facts,'5' so the nationality policy had abandoned the pursuit of count-
less rootless nationalities in order to concentrate on a few full-fledged,
fully equipped "nations." While the curtailment of ethnic quotas and
the new emphasis on Soviet meritocracy ("quality of cadres") slowed
down and sometimes reversed the indigenization process in party and
149. S. Dimanshtein, "Otvet na vopros, sostavliaiut li soboi evrei v nauchnom

smysle natsiiu," Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti 10 (1935): 77.
150. Simon, Nationalism, 61.
151. Greg Castillo, "Gorki Street and the Design of the Stalin Revolution," in
Zeynep Celik, Diane G. Favro and Richard Ingersoll, eds. Streets: Critical Perspectives on
Public Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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446 Slavic Review
managerial bureaucracies, the celebration of national cultures and the

production of native intelligentsias intensified dramatically. Uzbek
communities outside Uzbekistan were left to their own devices but
Uzbekistan as a quasi-nation-state remained in place, got rid of most
alien enclaves on its territory and concentrated on its history and lit-
erature. The Soviet apartment as a whole was to have fewer rooms but
the ones that remained were to be lavishly decorated with hometown
memorabilia, grandfather clocks and lovingly preserved family por-
traits.
Indeed, the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers, which in many ways
inaugurated high stalinism as a cultural paradigm, was a curiously
solemn parade of old-fashioned romantic nationalisms. Pushkin, Tol-
stoy and other officially restored Russian icons were not the only na-
tional giants of international stature-all Soviet peoples possessed, or
would shortly acquire, their own classics, their own founding fathers
and their own folkloric riches. The Ukrainian delegate said that Taras
Shevchenko was a "genius" and a "colossus" "whose role in the crea-
tion of the Ukrainian literary language was no less important than
Pushkin's role in the creation of the Russian literary language, and
perhaps even greater." 152 The Armenian delegate pointed out that his
nation's culture was "one of the most ancient cultures of the orient,''
that the Armenian national alphabet predated Christianity and that
the Armenian national epic was "one of the best examples of world
epic literature" because of "the lifelike realism of its imagery, its ele-
gance, the profundity and simplicity of its popular wisdom and the
democratic nature of its plot." 153 The Azerbaijani delegate insisted that
the Persian poet Nizami was actually a classic of Azerbaijani literature
because he was a "Turk from Giandzha," and that Mirza Fath Ali
Akhundov was not a gentry writer, as some proletarian critics had
charged, but a "great philosopher-playwright" whose "characters [were]
as colorful, diverse and realistic as the characters of Griboedov, Gogol'
and Ostrovskii." 154 The Turkmen delegate told the Congress about the
eighteenth century "coryphaeus of Turkmen poetry," Makhtum-Kuli;
the Tajik delegate explained that Tajik literature had descended from
Rudaki, Firdousi, Omar Khayyam and "other brilliant craftsmen of the
word"; while the Georgian delegate delivered an extraordinarily
lengthy address in which he claimed that Shot'ha Rust'haveli's The Man
in the Panther's Skin was "centuries ahead of west European intellectual
movements," infinitely superior to Dante and generally "the greatest
literary monument of the whole ... so-called medieval Christian
world." 155
According to the new party line, all officially recognized Soviet
nationalities were supposed to have their own nationally defined "Great
152. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s"ezd, 43, 49.

153. Ibid., 104.
154. Ibid., 116-17.
155. Ibid., 136, 142, 77.

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Traditions" that needed to be protected, perfected and, if need be,

invented by specially trained professionals in specially designated in-
stitutions. A culture's "greatness" depended on its administrative status
(from the Union republics at the top to the non-territorial nationalities
who had but a tenuous hold on "culture"), but within a given category
all national traditions except for the Russian were supposed to be of
equal value. Rhetorically this was not always the case (Ukraine was
sometimes mentioned as second-in-command while central Asia was
often described as backward), but institutionally all national territories
were supposed to be perfectly symmetrical-from the party apparatus
to the school system. This was an old Soviet policy but the contribution
of the 1930s consisted in the vigorous leveling of remaining uneven
surfaces and the equally vigorous manufacturing of special-and also
identical-culture-producing institutions. By the end of the decade all
Union republics had their own writers' unions, theaters, opera com-
panies and national academies that specialized primarily in national
history, literature and language.'56 Republican plans approved by Mos-
cow called for the production of ever larger numbers of textbooks,
plays, novels, ballets and short stories, all of them national in form
(which, in the case of dictionaries, folklore editions and the "classics"
series came dangerously close to being in content as well).
If some republics had a hard time keeping up with others, Moscow
tried to oblige. In 1935 and 1936, for example, the new State Institute
of Theater Art was in the process of training or had already released
eleven national theater companies complete with all actors and full
repertoires.157 If a national repertoire was still incomplete, translations
from mostly nineteenth century Russian and west European literatures
were actively encouraged or provided (the first productions of the new
Bashkir Opera in 1936 were Prince Igor and The Marriage of Figarol58).
In fact, in the late 1930s translation became one of the major Soviet
industries as well as the main source of sustenance for hundreds of
professional writers. The "friendship of the peoples" thesis required
that all Soviet nationalities be deeply moved by the art of other Soviet
nationalities. As Gorky put it, "We need to share our knowledge of the
past. It is important for all Union republics that a Belorussian know
what a Georgian or a Turk is like, etc." 15' This resulted not only in
frenzied translation activity but also in histories of the USSR that were
supposed to include all the Soviet peoples, radio shows that introduced
Soviet listeners to "Georgian polyphony and Belorussian folk songs,"
tours by hundreds of regulation "song and dance ensembles," decades
156. Zaslavsky, "Nationalism and Democratic Transition," 102.

157. North Ossetian, lakut, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Kara-Kalpak, Kabarda, Balkar, Turk-
men, Tajik, Adyge and Kalmyk (see A. Furmanova, "Podgotovka natsional'nykh kadrov
dlia teatra," Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti 5 [1936]: 29-30).
158. A. Chanyshev, "V bor'be za izuchenie i sozdanie natsional'noi kul'tury," Re-
voliutsiia i natsional'nosti 9 (1935): 61.
159. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s"ezd, 43. "Turk" stands for "Azerbaijani."

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448 Slavic Review
of Azerbaijani art in Ukraine, evenings of Armenian poetry in Moscow,

exhibits of Turkmen carpets in Kazan' and festivals of national choirs,
athletes and Young Pioneers all over the country. From the mid-1930s
through the 1980s, this activity was one of the most visible (and ap-
parently least popular) aspects of Soviet official culture.
The pursuit and propagation of national cultures were far from
uneventful, of course. Within ten years of the First Writers' Congress
most of the founding fathers of the new cultural institutions had per-
ished; large areas had been annexed, lost and reannexed; numerous
small ethnic units had been abolished as "unpromising"; and several
nations and former "national minorities" had been forcibly deported
from their territories. At the same time, the Russians had been trans-
formed from a revolutionary people recovering a national past into
"the most outstanding of all nations comprising the Soviet Union" 160
and the focus of world history. Once again, however, the legitimacy of
non-Russian "Great Traditions" was not questioned. The main enemies
of Russia-as-progress were "bourgeois nationalism," which now re-
ferred to insufficient admiration for Russia, and "rootless cosmopoli-
tanism," which represented the opposite of korenizatsiia-as-rootedness.
Even in 1936-1939, when hundreds of alleged nationalists were being
sentenced to death, "the whole Soviet country" was noisily celebrating
the 1000th anniversary of Firdousi, claimed by the Tajiks as one of the
founders of their (and not Persian) literature; the 500th anniversary
of Mir Ali Shir Nawaiy (Alisher Navoi), appropriated by the Uzbeks as
the great classic of their (and not Chaghatay) culture; and the 125th
anniversary of Taras Shevchenko, described by Pravda as "a great son
of the Ukrainian people" who "carried Ukrainian literature to a height
worthy of a people with a rich historical past."9 161The few national
icons that suffered during this period were attacked for being anti-
Russian, not for being national icons.'62 Similarly, when the Ukrainian
poet Volodymyr Sosiura was castigated by Pravda in 1951 for his poem
"Love Ukraine," the alleged sin consisted not in loving Ukraine too
much but in not thanking the elder brother enough.'63 A major reason
for gratitude was the recent Soviet annexation of west Ukraine and
the subsequent "reunification" of the Ukrainian nation state, a Soviet/
Russian achievement widely advertised as a fulfillment of Ukrainian
national aspirations.
In fact, it was in this period of Russian delusions of grandeur that
the theoretical justification for non-Russian national aspirations was
160. Stalin, Sochineniia 2 (XV): 204.

161. "Khronika," Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti 8 (1936): 80; Rakowska-Harmstone,
Russia and Nationalism, 250-59; Allworth, The Modern Uzbeks, 229-30; Yaroslav Bi-
linsky, The Second Soviet Republic: Thte Ukraine after World War II (New Brunswick: Rutg
University Press, 1964), 191.
162. Lowell Tillett, The Great Friendship: Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian Nation-
alities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), passim.
163. Bilinsky, The Second Soviet Republic, 15-16; Robert Conquest, Soviet Nationali-
ties Policy in Practice (New York: Praeger, 1967), 65-66.

129.67.53.2 on Mon, 01 May 2023 16:58:57 +00:00
clearly formulated. On 7 April 1948 Stalin said something that closely

resembled his 1913 statement on national rights:
Every nation, whether large or small, has its own specific qualities and
its own peculiarities, which are unique to it and which other nations
do not have. These peculiarities form a contribution that each nation
makes to the common treasury of world culture, adding to it and
enriching it. In this sense all nations, both small and large, are in the
same position and each nation is equal to any other nation.164
This seemed to suggest that ethnicity was universal, irreducible and

inherently moral. But this was only an overture. In summer 1950 Stalin
put his pen to paper in order to exorcize the spirit of N. Ia. Marr, one
of the last saints of the Great Transformation whose theories and stu-
dents had somehow escaped the fate of the other "simplifiers and vul-
garizers of marxism." 165 According to Stalin, language was not part of
the superstructure-or, indeed, of the base. It "belonged to the whole
nation" and was "common to the whole society" across social classes
and thoughout history. "Societies" represented ethnic communities
and ethnic communities had "essences" that existed "incomparably
longer than any base or any superstructure." 166 In short, it was official:
classes and their "ideologies" came and went, but nationalities re-
mained. In a country free from social conflict, ethnicity was the only
meaningful identity.
This was the legacy that Stalin bequeathed to his successors and
that survived 1984 to haunt Gorbachev and his successors. Khrushchev
balked, of course: in his struggle for local initiative he strengthened
the position of the entrenched national elites, while in his struggle
against the entrenched national elites he tried to promote an ethnicity-
blind personnel policy and even scared some people by resurrecting
the "fusion of nations" doctrine. The fusion was to occur under com-
munism, however, and communism was to occur too soon to be taken
seriously. The only practical step in this direction was the 1959 school
reform that allowed parents the freedom to choose between Russian
and non-Russian schools and made "another" language optional. The-
oretically, a Kazakh could now forego Russian; practically, a Russian
was no longer forced to take Kazakh.167 The self-confidently homoge-
neous establishments of Armenia and Lithuania expressed relatively
little concern, the "numerically small" ethnic bureaucracies within the
RSFSR prepared for the inevitable and the linguistically threatened
but politically vigorous elites in Latvia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan put
up a desperate fight. Their argument was summed up by Oles' Honchar
thirty years later: "To learn or not to learn a native language in school-
164. Stalin, Sochineniia 3 (XVI): 100.

165. Ibid., 146.
166. Ibid., 117, 119, 138.
167. See Yaroslav Bilinsky, "The Soviet Education Laws of 1958-9 and Soviet
Nationality Policy," Soviet Studies 14, no. 2 (October 1962): 138-57.

129.67.53.2 on Mon, 01 May 2023 16:58:57 +00:00
450 Slavic Review
this question cannot arise in any civilized country." 168 A civilized coun-
try, in other words, was an ethno-national state in which the official
language was by definition "native." The stalinist nationality policy
had obviously borne fruit.
Civilized stalinism ("developed socialism") was the credo of the
"collective leadership" that presided over the twilight years of the So-
viet Union. Deriving its legitimacy from the "really existing" ethno-
territorial welfare state rather than future communism and past rev-
olution, the new official discourse retained the language of class as
window dressing and relied on nationality to prop up the system.'69
Every Soviet citizen was born into a certain nationality, took it to day
care and through high school, had it officially confirmed at the age of
sixteen and then carried it to the grave through thousands of appli-
cation forms, certificates, questionnaires and reception desks. It made
a difference in school admissions and it could be crucial in employ-
ment, promotions and draft assignments.'70 Soviet anthropologists,
brought back to life in the late 1930s and provided with a raison d'etre
after the banishment of marrism, were not supposed to study "culture":
their job was to define, dissect and delight in the primordial "ethnos."
Even abroad, in a world dominated by capitalism, the most visible
virtue was "national liberation."
All nationalities were ranked-theoretically along the evolutionary
scale from tribe to nation, and practically by territorial or social status.
The status of a given nationality could vary a great deal but the con-
tinuing use of ethnic quotas made sure that most practical advantages
accrued to the members of titular nationalities residing in "their own"
republics. Sixty years of remarkable consistency on this score had re-
sulted in almost total "native" control over most Union republics: large
ethnic elites owed their initial promotions and their current legitimacy
(such as it was) to the fact of being ethnic.'7' Dependent on Moscow
for funds, the political and cultural entrepreneurs owed their alle-
giance to "their own people" and their own national symbols. But if
the politicians were structurally constrained within the apparatus, the
intellectuals were specifically trained and employed to produce na-
tional cultures. Limits were set by the censor but the goal was seen as
legitimate both by party sponsors and by national consumers. A very
large proportion of national intellectuals were professional historians,
philologists and novelists, and most of them wrote for and about their
168. Quoted in Isabelle T. Kreindler, "Soviet Language Planning since 1953," in

Kirkwood, ed., Language Planning, 49. See also Bilinsky, The Second Soviet Republic,
20-35; Farmer, Ukrainian Nationalism, 134-43; Grey Hodnett, "The Debate over Soviet
Federalism," Soviet Studies 28, no. 4 (April 1967): 458-81; Simon, Nationalism, 233-64.
169. See, in particular, Lapidus, "Ethnonationalism and Political Stability," 355-
80; Zaslavsky, "Nationalism and Democratic Transition"; Farmer, Ukrainian National-
ism, 61-73.
170. Rasma Karklins, Ethnic Relations in the USSR: The Perspective from Below (Bos-
ton: Unwin Hyman, 1986).
171. See Roeder, "Soviet Federalism," 196-233.

129.67.53.2 on Mon, 01 May 2023 16:58:57 +00:00
own ethnic group.'72 They produced multi-volume national histories,

invented national genealogies, purified national languages, preserved
national treasures and bemoaned the loss of a national past.' 3 In other
words, they acted like good patriots-when they were not acting like
bad nationalists. As time went on, however, it became increasingly
difficult to distinguish between the two because the national form
seemed to have become the content and because nationalism did not
seem to have any content other than the cult of form. More ominously,
the country's leaders found it harder and harder to explain what their
"socialist content" stood for and, when Gorbachev finally discarded
the worn-out marxist verbiage, the only language that remained was
the well honed and long practiced language of nationalism.
The Soviet regime's contribution to the nationalist cause was not
limited to "constructive measures," of course. It forced the high priests
of national cultures to be part-time worshipers of other national cul-
tures, it instituted an administrative hierarchy that privileged some
ethnic groups over others, it interfered in the selection and mainte-
nance of national pantheons, it isolated ethnic communities from their
relatives and sympathizers abroad; and it encouraged massive migra-
tions that resulted in competition for scarce resources, diluted the
consumer base of the national elites and provoked friction over ethnic
quotas. Finally and most fatefully, it deprived the various nations of
the right to political independence-a right that was the culmination
of all nationalist doctrines, including the one that lay at the foundation
of the Soviet Union.
This points to another great tension in Soviet nationality policy:
the coexistence of republican statehood and passport nationality.'74
The former assumed that territorial states made nations, the latter
suggested that primordial nations might be entitled to their own states.
The former presupposed that all residents of Belorussia would (and
should) some day become Belorussian, the latter provided the non-
Belorussian residents with arguments against it. The Soviet govern-
ment endorsed both definitions without ever attempting to construct
an ethnically meaningful Soviet nation or turn the USSR into a Russian
nation state, so that when the non-national Soviet state had lost its
Soviet meaning, the national non-states were the only possible heirs.
Except for the Russian Republic, that is. Its borders were blurred, its
identity was not clearly ethnic and its "titular" residents had trouble
distinguishing between the RSFSR and the USSR.175 Seventy years after
172. Rakowska-Harmstone, "The Dialectics," 10-15. Cf. Miroslav Hroch, Social

Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
173. See, in particular, Farmer, Ukrainian Nationalism, 85-121. Also Allworth, The
Modern Uzbeks, 258-59; Simon, Nationalism, 281-82.
174. For a remarkably elegant interpretation of this tension, see Rogers Brubaker,
"Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia:
An Institutionalist Account," forthcoming in Theory and Society.
175. Victor Zaslavsky, "The Evolution of Separatism in Soviet Society under Gor-
bachev," in Gail W. Lapidus and Victor Zaslavsky, with Philip Goldman, eds., From

129.67.53.2 on Mon, 01 May 2023 16:58:57 +00:00
452 Slavic Review
the X Party Congress the policy of indigenization reached its logical

conclusion: the tenants of various rooms barricaded their doors and
started using the windows, while the befuddled residents of the enor-
mous hall and kitchen stood in the center scratching the backs of their
heads. Should they try to recover their belongings? Should they knock
down the walls? Should they cut off the gas? Should they convert their
"living area" into a proper apartment?
Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in the Soviet Republics (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 83; Leokadiia Drobizheva, "Perestroika and the
Ethnic Consciousness of the Russians," in ibid., 98-111.

129.67.53.2 on Mon, 01 May 2023 16:58:57 +00:00

2) Slezkine (1994) - The USSR As A Communal Apartment PDF

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The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2501300

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Soviet nationality policy was devised and carried out by nationalists.

Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994)

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scholars failed to notice the chronic ethnophilia of the Soviet regime,

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5. I. V. Stalin, Marksizm i natsional'nyi vopros (Moscow: Politizdat, 1950), 51.

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What social class could demand self-determination and under what

9. Stalin, Marksizm, 37. The view of a nation (as opposed to a nationality) as a

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culture] in all languages, 'adapting' themselves to all local and national

15. Lenin, "Kriticheskie zametki," 9.

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"great-power chauvinism," was gratuitously malevolent; the second was

Having transformed capitalism into socialism, the proletariat will cre-

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reigned supreme. "Many of these peoples have nothing in common

28. S. Dimanshtein, "Narodnyi komissariat po delam natsional'nostei," Zhizn'nat-

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cannot be abolished by decree. We should be very careful here. And

Finally, backward nations had not developed a "differentiation of the

34. Ibid., 106.

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of Siberia had no literary tradition and needed "an independent gov-

42. TsGAOR, f. 1318, op. 1, d. 994, 1. 100.

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''nationality question" with the question of backwardness and present

a) develop and strengthen their own Soviet statehood in a form that

There were to be as many nation states with varying degrees of auton-

46. Desiatyi s"ezd Rossiiskoi Kommunisticheskoi partii: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow:

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51. "Belorusskii natsional'nyi vopros i kommunisticheskaia partiia," Zhizn' na-

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dominant and thus irrelevant. The Russian territory was "unmarked"

54. Desiatyi s"ezd, 112, 114.

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Ordzhonikidze, Georgians made up 25% of the overall population of

61. Dvenadtsatyi s"ezd, 543-45.

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coincide with the collective names that variously defined communities

The most thorough determination of the tribal composition of the

Under the Provisional Government the nationality question moved

64. Ob uchrezhdenii Komissii po izucheniiu plemennogo sostava naseleniia Rossii. Izvestiia

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monly used "marker of tribal composition" was language. Party ideo-

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religion-as-culture outweighed language and became a crucial ethnic

Subsequently the Kirgiz [i.e., Kazakh] abandoned their claims on Tash-

Such odd strategic or "national interest" considerations (as in Kazakh

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To become official, however, a language had to be "modernized."

I. The principal material of the Tatar literary language should

b) by a borrowing from among old-Turkish words that are no

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According to the official policy of korenizatsiia (literally, "taking root"

The majestic ancient mosques of Samarkand ..; the white minarets

94. For a survey, see Simon, Nationalism, 20-70.